An ode to small Chinese cities
Exploring Chenzhou, Zixing, Dongjiang Lake, and searching for the "average Chinese citizen"
The original version of this essay was posted as a thread to Twitter on June 28, 2022. It was republished, with my permission, in the Pekingnology newsletter as well as a slightly edited version for HK culture magazine Friday Everywhere. I would also like to share it here, on my own site.
Welcome to Chenzhou
FOR FOUR DAYS, I’ve been in southern Hunan in the city of Chenzhou (郴州). Chenzhou is not a big or famous city. But its stories are worth telling anyway. I’ll tell you why.
Let me start with a framing question:
Where do you suppose most Chinese people live? Big cities? Small cities? Villages?
I was curious, and honestly didn’t know the answer. I even posted a quiz on Twitter, which forced me to actually go find the answer.
To get my answer, I searched the population of all 19 First Tier and New First Tier cities in China, and added them up. The sum was 293 million people, which is just 20.7% of the total Chinese population.
In other words, eight out of ten Chinese people don’t live in the 19 biggest cities.
So where do they live? Well, according to the “Tier Ranking” system, there are:
30 Second Tier cities (places which the average non-Chinese living in China will have heard of, but perhaps not visited.)
70 Third Tier cities: (Most Chinese people will know most of these. Non-Chinese will likely know only a few.)
90 Fourth Tier cities: (Chinese people will probably know only a few of these)
128 Fifth Tier cities: (Chinese people will probably ask you: “有这个城市吗？” (“is that a city?”)
China’s total urbanized population has been estimated to be about 914 million. Subtracting the population of the First and Second Tier cities, that leaves around 600 million urbanized population living in smaller cities and townships (plus about 500 million more in the REAL countryside). So, in fact, the “median Chinese citizen”, if such a person exists, across 1.4 billion people, should statistically be a resident of a small, mostly-unknown city.
And that brings us back to Fourth-Tier Chenzhou, in southern Hunan province. Officially it has 4.5 million people, but like many prefecture-level cities in China, that figure can be misleading. Chenzhou has many administrative districts and counties, some of which are far from the city center and could hardly be considered part of the Chenzhou downtown urban build-up. The two core urbanized districts (Beihu District and Suxian District) of Chenzhou have about one million people together.
In my opinion, if you work in any of kind of China-adjacent field and ever reference “the Chinese masses” when you discuss any kind of sociocultural phenomena, or the political priorities of Chinese leaders, you MUST be sure to think about Chenzhou and cities like it. Because that’s where most of “the Chinese masses” actually live.
A poor and slow-paced city
In Chenzhou, people here invariably describe their city as poor and slow-paced (and, in comparison to First and Second Tier cities, they are). But even here, there are new shopping malls, clean roads, nice tea shops, universities, well-manicured parks, and plazas.
While traveling I often practice a habit that I’ve picked up from traveling with Chinese people: everywhere I go I ask the locals about the price of local real estate. “Our wages… they aren’t high. Actually, house prices… they aren’t high either. But they’re still expensive for sure, because of our low wages,” says my cab driver. “Chenzhou is poor you know. We aren’t wealthy like Changsha,” he adds, referring to the provincial capital of Hunan.
I fact-check using some real estate apps. New Chenzhou real estate averages 5,000 to 7,000 RMB/sqm. Nicer places cost 10,000 RMB/sqm. The fanciest, newest luxury apartment building in town is 21,000 RMB/sqm. This is just ONE FIFTH the price you’ll pay for an old construction, secondhand apartment in Shanghai.
“This machine is broken. The machine on the first floor is broken too. We have to go to the second floor. The hospital is too poor,” the nurse at the Chenzhou First People’s Hospital tells me, as I try to scan my barcode to pick up the results of my 16 RMB PCR test.
“It’s good you speak Chinese,” she adds. “No one here speaks English. Last year we had a foreigner here for a test, it was very difficult to communicate.” Hmm, so they get one per year?
I figure there are probably less than 15 non-Chinese living in this whole city. I wonder what paths they took to get here? Searching on LinkedIn, I find one woman supposedly teaching English here. Has she really been here eight years?
My wife and I go out for dinner that night in a nice, newer-looking mall. The Korean BBQ restaurant has touchscreen ordering. The mall has a trampoline park and a go-kart track and a ball pit.
“It’s so much more fun to be a kid now in China,” says my wife. She grew up in the 1990s in a Hubei city even smaller than Chenzhou. “There’s so much more to do. “
The mall, the nicest in town, has an H&M, a Uniqlo, and a bevy of domestic brands I’ve never seen in malls in any large cities. There’s a wall of street food waiting outside the main entrance. No Starbucks, but there is a Pacific Coffee, the Hong Kong copy of Starbucks. There’s no Louis Vuitton or Gucci; If you can afford those, you have to go to Changsha.
What’s a trademark?
Out on the pedestrian street near the mall, the ancient tradition of zero fucks about registered trademarks is still practiced loudly and proudly (unlike in the big cities, where these products have really disappeared in recent years). I guess small cities are now the sweet spot for these knockoff products.
Domestic brands aren’t safe either. This local “ode” to a certain famous Changsha tea chain has 26 locations in Chenzhou, according to online reviewing platform Dazhong Dianping. One review says: “The style of 霓裳茶舞 looks similar to SexyTea… isn’t it TOO similar?”
This is the logo of the tea brand in question – a well-known Changsha-based milk tea chain with locations in dozens of cities. Take a close look at the logos and draw your own conclusions (oh, and the menus are identical, too).
It ain’t quiet…
The streets of Chenzhou are an overwhelming cacophony of car horns, recorded messages screaming about shop discounts, and wizened chain-smoking uncles dragging up a half-century of tar from their lungs every five seconds. It smells of stinky tofu and motorcycle exhaust and the air has a humidity level of 95%.
But everyone is intensely friendly. Everywhere I go, a chorus of “Hello! How are you!” and “外国人!” [“Foreigner!”] follows. People stare openly until you stare back (except kids; they keep staring).
To my surprise, I hear mostly Mandarin in Chenzhou, even from adults. Only old folks are speaking Hunanese. But, if you’ll allow me to offer a subjective statement here: of all the regions I’ve traveled to in China, Hunanese efforts to speak Mandarin (i.e. 湖普) yield some of the most labored, garbled results I’ve EVER heard. Ethnic minorities in remote villages in Guangxi speak clearer Mandarin than the locals of Hunan. It feels like there’s some fundamental linguistic incompatibility between Hunanese and Mandarin going on here. But I digress.
What Chenzhou is known for
Chenzhou itself is mostly known for two things:
1) Having a funny name.
郴 chēn is a very rare character that only appears in this city’s name. It means “a town in a forest” (林中之邑).
2. A few natural scenic areas that are “Hunan famous” but not quite “China famous”.
An example of this: About 30km north of downtown is the county-level city of Zixing: population 320,000, administratively part of Chenzhou, but quite different. It is a newly-emerged tourist town in Chenzhou.
In 2015, the provincial government got the local Dongjiang Lake upgraded to a 5A tourist attraction. Now Zixing is on its way to becoming a Real Destination. That’s why we’re here in the first place.
The receptionist at our guesthouse is from Zixing. She says all the new guesthouses and restaurants on the river are owned by Changsha bosses, including this one. They certainly show a certain aesthetic that I wouldn’t normally have expected from a hotel in a city this small.
She thinks the tourism has been good for the river: it’s better maintained and prettier now. But it’s also louder now, with lots of construction. One complaint: the new restaurants opened by Changsha bosses are too expensive. They charge the same prices for locals as they do to tourists, which isn’t very nice.
She makes just 2,000 RMB (US$300) plus meals and housing a month, but it’s better than going to work 12 hours a day at the electronics factory. At the factory, she could get 3,000 to 4,000, but it’s harder work. Having a tourism industry is a nicer way to stay in her hometown. Otherwise, you must leave, like most of her classmates. One of her classmates went to Changsha but came back after a month. Missed home…
The receptionist says she has never been to Changsha. Went to Shenzhen once though. Didn’t like it… too big.
A whole different cast of humanity
At this time, I am intensely thankful for the privilege of being able to travel and work at the same time, exploring this country, filling in bits of knowledge like a paint-by-numbers. The countryside, the small cities, the big cities, all part of the patchwork of the modern Chinese existence.
Too often, I think the conception of the modern Chinese citizen is reduced to a limited cast of stereotyped characters visible in First-Tier cities: The 996 tech worker. The plucky artist. The migrant worker. But there’s a whole different cast of humanity in smaller cities, people who can’t be conceived of if you’re only seeing samples from large cities.
Like my receptionist, the small town local who doesn’t want to move to the big city, away from her family, but who also doesn’t want to work in a factory, and is delighted that tourism in her hometown created a job that lets her sit in an air-conditioned lobby and watch videos on her phone. Heh.
I took a break here and returned to continue the Twitter thread the next day.
Learning about Dongjiang Lake
Today I had a really nice chat with one of the cleaners at the hotel, Mrs. Xu. I was asking some questions of a different receptionist and she didn’t know how to answer, but Mrs. Xu overheard. And she was very happy to talk.
Basically, I was trying to ask the receptionist what living conditions in Zixing were like before the 5A tourist rating in 2015 and she was kind of struggling and telling me “Sorry, I’m only 18 years old… I was a child at that point.”
And then Mrs. Xu (a star, honestly) was like: “I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE NOW” and then talked nonstop for almost an hour.
So. Mrs. Xu was actually born in the “库区” i.e., “reservoir zone” and moved down from the mountain into Zixing city when she was five years old. “Reservoir zone” is what the old locals call Dongjiang Lake, because before it was rebranded as a tourist lake, it was just a reservoir.
The dam where the lake feeds into the river was planned back in the 1960s but was halted and didn’t end up being completed until 1986. The years between 1986 and 1989 were very hard for the local villages. There was originally no lake here, so the damming of the river flooded their fields and they starved. That’s when Mrs. Xu came down to Zixing City: it was too hard to live in the “reservoir area” as the lake was still forming.
I grabbed this aerial shot of the dam (above) from dongjianghu.com. It faces south, with the dam/lake to the east, and the river slicing northwest down through the canyon. On the tourist bus coming in (the road is visible on the canyon wall), the guide introduced the dam, including Dongjiang Lake’s role as a clean water reservoir and the dam’s role as a peaking power station for the Central Grid.
Mrs. Xu said the gov’t tried to help the flooded villages’ economies by introducing new industries. First, they tried silkworm cultivation, but those didn’t take very well. The silkworms all died, and the villages stayed poor.
Then researchers from a state-owned fruit company came and said the climate was good for fruit. Fishing in the new reservoir and fruit cultivation became the new industries.
At first the fruit sold poorly because it wasn’t known around the country as a place for fruit, but then the government arranged large state-owned fruit companies to buy the fruit produced and sell it in the coastal provinces, so now their output is guaranteed. I had a local plum (below) at breakfast one morning. It was a bit too sour, but I think it’s still too early in the season.
Finally going to Dongjiang Lake
Arriving at the ticket entrance to Dongjiang Lake, I spot some efforts to keep the natural environment looking pristine…all the tour buses are electric and there’s an EV parking lot directly opposite the entrance. Not a bad perk in the 34-degree weather, considering the other parking lots are at least 400m away.
After taking the tour bus into the inside the tourist zone, and getting off next to the dam, you have the option of taking a hike through the Dragon Vista Canyon or a boat ride out to an island in the middle of the lake with a cave to explore. The canyon path is a really nice little hike. Fairly steep, but that means fewer people. It’s a short loop that takes about an hour.
After my enjoyable hike, I was ready for the other attraction at Dongjiang Lake: the boat ride out to the island. Unfortunately, my experience was about to go downhill.
Tour groups are LOUD
This is a good time to talk about one of the worst things about traveling to famous attractions in China: package tour groups. On our boat ride, we had the severe misfortune of sharing the ferry with a tour group of middle-aged women out on a tour group and MY GOD they were loud.
My head was ringing after five minutes. Douyin videos, ringtones, shouting into cell phones held at arm’s length, all punctuated by barks from the guide’s microphone. It was claustrophobic and actually anxiety-inducing. It’s worth planning your whole trip around avoiding tour groups. I couldn’t believe how much sound they were generating, in glaring contrast to the serene, natural surroundings.
But actually, bizarrely bad sound-related experiences are common in Chinese tourist zones. Earlier, while hiking the canyon, enveloped in the musty smell of earth and water, and the buzz of frogs and cicadas, I rounded a bend and found a speaker concealed as a stump, blaring a bassy electronic song with a whiny high-pitched children’s chorus. Why would you do such a thing?!?
Some of this can be attributed to cultural differences. There’s an important Chinese word renao 热闹 that means like… bustling, active, full of energy. Certain places are supposed to be 热闹, like restaurants, plazas, shopping centers. That’s why you see restaurants designed as one giant room. People don’t want a quiet dining area.
But I find this craving for 热闹 goes too far for my tastes. I don’t want my nature trail to be 热闹. I don’t need a misty riverfront to be 热闹. And the 热闹 that a group of excited middle-aged aunties on vacation brings to the party is ALWAYS too much. It’s deafening.
The lake and the cave
The lake itself is… pretty nice. Halfway through the boat ride, you can go to the upper deck and take pictures. There are small villages on the banks with fruit orchards, clearly the beneficiaries of the state fruit-buying campaign.
We arrive on the island and run ahead of the tour group to try to make it to the cave. We were hoping to get in ahead of them, but no such luck. They do the tours in batches, and they ended up waiting for the tour group. We say screw it, skipping the cave and taking the next boat back to the mainland to escape them.
Mrs. Xu says the cave on the island is natural and she remembers visiting it as a kid. You used to have to take a flashlight in and it was scary. When the tourist area was built, they expanded the cave and installed lights. I’m not so concerned about missing it. I’ve been to a lot of caves in China. They’re fun, but they tend to all look the same.
On the way back, we catch a few glimpses of the mist on the river. In places where the canyon narrows, the mist on top of the river piles up like chunky clouds, lasting later into the day because the canyon walls prevent the sun from burning it off.
The local fisherman casting their nets into the misty waters is the quintessential Dongjiang Lake shot. I didn’t get one myself, so the talents of others will have to suffice (honestly, if you’ve seen much of my photography, it’s probably for the best).
Mrs. Xu says the area got famous a decade ago because a photographer from Beijing stayed here for a year and took pictures of the fishermen in the mist, which subsequently become very popular. I check up on the details of this story, which of course is totally accurate, because Mrs. Xu is the best. The photographer’s name is Cao Guangwen and his photography basically created Dongjiang Lake as a travel destination back in the first half of the 2010s.
But here’s the funny thing: the fishing doesn’t happen here anymore. Mrs. Xu says those guys throwing nets into the water for tourists to take pictures is a staged performance. The local government doesn’t want fishing boats driving around and polluting the water, so there’s no actual fishing going on, just photo ops.
Mrs. Xu doesn’t know where the supposed “local fish” on all the restaurant menus come from. Not Dongjiang Lake though.
Fortunately, my taxi driver on the way back to Chenzhou train station knows: These days, the fish are cultivated on fish farms in the river downstream from the tourist area. In particular the “Dongjiang salmon” is farmed there.
Yes, that’s right, salmon. Zixing is famous for its salmon sashimi! We had some for dinner one night. It started out great, but then we had to eat 3 more plates, just like this, because we had ordered a WHOLE fish. Oops. Don’t think I’m going to be eating salmon for a loooong time.
Why is everyone so short?
I mention to Mrs. Xu something I’ve noticed: Many people in this area are REALLY short, especially elders. She’s quite short herself. Sometimes you’ll see three generations of the family walking together and the tallest person in the group will be a 12-year old girl.
She answers with a big smile: “That’s because children eat well now!” She continues with the same smile, seemingly oblivious to its unsettling contrast with the words coming out of her mouth: “When I was young, it wasn’t that we ate poorly… it was that there was nothing to eat at all.”
But, she adds, thanks to tourism and fruit cultivation, replacing fishing, (which was forbidden in 2015), the villages of the “reservoir area” are now some of the wealthiest in Zixing. Villagers grow fruit and also can rent their properties to entrepreneurs who open guesthouses. These economic activities have proven to be quite profitable…you can make as much as 80,000 RMB a year renting out your property for a guesthouse, and even get a job working in the guesthouse if you want.
Now, I am struck strongly by the complexity and depth needed if you want to faithfully and honestly tell the story of the Chinese economic transformation.
Rarely, if ever do you find a story that is clearly black or white, success or failure, an easy framing for a lazy summary report. It’s a story of gradual improvement, picking out a path by trial and error. In these meandering, tricky journeys, there are surely lessons to learn for other developing countries though.
There’s a Chinese maxim that explains it vividly: “Crossing the River By Feeling the Stones” (oh hey, that’s the title of the blog).
This post is already long enough, so I’ll cut it off here. Actually, there was another long Twitter thread about Chenzhou after this one, where I looked at its food, its real estate market, and the visible effects of Covid on the tourism economy. It can be found in a separate essay posted here.
I enjoyed this, thanks. I've been living in Chenzhou for 8 years now. So its refreshing to get an outsiders view. Although we didn't have any lockdowns here during Covid, the economy was badly affected...A kind of natural withdrawal from the normal daily life outside in the streets. But as you say, people here are always looking for new ways forward. And that's happening. Its brash and exciting and sometimes uncomfortable. But people are winning again!
As someone who grew up in states but often went back to my third tier hometown. I enjoyed reading this. Thank you.