Between the people and the land: Revisiting the Xingguo Survey, 96 years later

By the time we sat down, the table was already crowded with peanuts, sunflower seeds, fruit and sweets, laid out for guests in the local Hakka tradition. Our hosts kept pushing the plates toward us as we opened our notebooks. Children wandered through the courtyard; older family members sat nearby, reminding us to eat.

Ninety-six years earlier, eight farmers from this part of Xingguo had sat down for a different set of questions. Over several days in October 1930, they were asked how many people lived in their households, how much land they worked, what they grew, what they earned and spent, what they owed and who could read. Their answers became the Xingguo Survey, a detailed account of eight rural families and the economics of their everyday lives.

We returned to their villages to meet their descendants. The families still had farmland. Some still grew rice, oranges or oil-tea trees. But their livelihoods now stretched far beyond it: children and grandchildren worked in factories and offices in other provinces, ran businesses, attended universities or had left farming altogether.

The land remained. What had changed was how much it could tell us about a family’s life.

In 1930, land could tell you much more. A family with too little might rent additional fields, surrendering part of the harvest in return. If what remained could not last the year, it might borrow money, grain or other necessities. The Xingguo Survey tracked these relationships alongside household income and expenses. 

Land determined not only what a family could produce, but how much it could keep and what it owed before the next harvest began.

Wen Changxin, now 80, had trouble hearing us, so every question had to be asked loudly, sometimes more than once. But once he understood what we had come to ask about, the difficulty was getting a word in. He leaned forward and talked quickly, moving from one detail to the next, often continuing through questions he could not hear. His father, Wen Fengzhang, was the only one of the eight men interviewed in 1930 to live into the 1970s. Father and son lived together until Wen Changxin was 28, giving him something the other descendants we met did not have: decades of memories heard directly from a man who had sat through the original survey.

Much of what he remembered was remarkably specific. Once he started, one memory seemed to pull out another. He recalled what his father had told him about the survey, the journey that preceded it and small details that had survived in the family for nearly a century.

Then we asked him about himself: What, in his own 80 years, had made him happiest? What did he remember most?

Wen paused. Then, almost instinctively, he returned to his father. He began telling us about the places he had traveled over the years to speak about the Xingguo Survey, recounting again the stories Wen Fengzhang had passed down to him. Farming had long since ceased to be the center of his own working life: Wen became a primary-school teacher, yet when asked to think back across eight decades for what had stayed with him most, he reached for memories of a time when his father's life was inseparable from the land.

In that sense, the story has outlived the way of life it was described. Wen no longer makes his living from the land. But when asked what had stayed with him longest, he talked about a time when his father had little choice but to.

The household form we were shown for Wen's family looked very different from the one his father had helped fill in 96 years earlier. 

It listed 22 family members across several generations. One of Wen's three sons still farmed at home; the other two had left for work, one elsewhere in Jiangxi and the other in Guangdong. Among the grandchildren were factory workers, an employee in the property business and students still making their way through school. The family still held seven mu of farmland and 40 mu (6.59 acres) of forestland. But only one of Wen's three sons still made his living farming at home.

A few villages away, Li Jiyuan's story took a different turn. In the 1990s, Li left Xingguo for Guangdong, where he worked construction while his wife stayed behind with their child. Like many rural workers of his generation, he had gone where there was more money to be made.

Then his child fell ill and died while Li was away.

Li came home. He returned to farming in Yongfeng, not because the fields offered better prospects than construction work in Guangdong, but because he wanted to be with his wife.

“Family need to be together,” he told us. “When you're together, things get better. Whatever comes, you can work it out.”

Li is 70 now and still grows rice on 2 mu (0.33 acres) of farmland. His family has spread out again. 

His son works in Anhui Province and his daughter-in-law in Shenzhen City. One grandson went to university and is now doing his master in mathematics and artificial intelligence (AI) at Sun Yat-sen University. His grandson, Li Xingfu, told us he was interested in using AI and other modern technologies to solve problems in farming, with the hope that what he learns might eventually help him do agricultural work more efficiently.

Across the families we met, land had not disappeared. What had changed was the number of ways a family could live around it. In 1930, land was closely tied to food, income, rent and debt. Later generations could work the same fields, leave them for jobs elsewhere, or let someone else farm them. Their children could grow up in the countryside without necessarily becoming farmers themselves. A family's relationship with land was becoming less a fixed condition than a set of choices.

Those choices also changed the shape of the family. Wen Changxin became a teacher instead of a farmer, yet spent much of his later life retelling the stories his father had passed down about farming and the Xingguo Survey. Li Jiyuan left his rice fields for construction work in Guangdong, then returned after the death of a child because, as he put it, “People need to be together.” His grandson left again, this time for university. Leaving the land no longer necessarily means abandoning it.

It was late August in Jiangxi. A rainstorm had just passed over Yongfeng, leaving the village smelling of wet earth under a bright, humid sky. In a few days, Li Jiyuan’s grandson, Li Xingfu, would return to Guangzhou to continue studying how AI and algorithms could improve farming. Wen Changxin’s granddaughter had just qualified as a teacher and, like her grandfather, was beginning her career in the countryside.

Both Wen and Li said that when they could no longer farm, others could take over their fields. Whoever worked them could keep the earnings. It was a striking reversal from the world recorded in the 1930 Xingguo Survey, when families short of land rented from those with more, gave up part of their harvest and could fall deeper into debt. Now, a village official said, as farmers age, fields can be consolidated and worked with modern machinery, while households retain their rights and receive the proceeds.

Rice paddies, orange groves and oil-tea trees still cover the countryside. What has changed is the hold they have over a life. Land can be farmed, left to others, returned to – or approached anew by a generation coming home with different tools. The land remains. The choice is increasingly theirs.