How one architect’s guesthouse reflects the country’s economic evolution
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Xingming Village, China: Located on a hill in a small village in central China, Li Zhiying’s family guesthouse has a magnificent view.
Just beyond the front door is a view of a pristine reservoir surrounded by pine forests and framed by low cloud-covered mountain ranges.
Li’s neighbors tend their crops of beans, peppers, pumpkins and corn on small plots of land near their home, along the cul-de-sac that runs in front of his house.
Village dogs bark and get vicious on the street, chickens roam freely. On the roadside, an old man picks Sichuan peppercorns that will flavor tea and tingle the tongues of his neighbors who stop by in the evenings for the daily ritual of gossip and card games.
I came to Li’s hometown, Xingming, in China’s central Hunan province, to spend three days exploring a different side of the modern Chinese story that often makes headlines. The ordinariness of rural life.
It’s a snapshot of the so-called “real China”, which represents the daily lives of millions of Chinese people more than the dancing robots, drone light shows and dizzying pace of artificial intelligence development that is reshaping the tech hubs of Beijing, Shenzhen and Hangzhou.
The evening I arrive, we stroll down the street and walk towards the house of the retired village party secretary, a local Communist Party official; The woman’s husband offers watermelon slices and tea in plastic cups to every neighbor who stops to chat.
“Hello Australia, welcome, please enjoy our village,” one of the elders said to me using a translation app.
This is the land of Chairman Mao, where portraits of China’s former religious leader hang in the homes of old peasants, where history – at least in the West – remains disgraced by its verdict on the disaster wrought by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
“Mao is like a god to us,” a local party staff member from a neighboring province told me over lunch at the guesthouse. “He understood ordinary people.”
The nearest market is 5 kilometers away, in a small, unpretentious town where everyone is curious about the visiting stranger (me). There are lots of signs, waves and lots of smiles.
“Never!” An old villager who runs a pork stall answers when I ask how often foreigners come to the market.
Nearby, a man is loading chunks of fresh meat into the trunk of his car, which is covered only by a piece of cardboard.
Another seller sells a freshly slaughtered whole dog with the hair shaved but the skin intact. Although Li says he has never seen dog meat sold here before, it is a contradictory sight for those who do not know the experience.
By his own admission, Li warns guests in advance that his home is in a remote rural village that most Chinese have never heard of. There is no tourist infrastructure and daily village life is slow-paced and perhaps boring.
“If you’re looking for a comfortable and easy introduction to China, this might not be the place,” the guesthouse’s website says.
But he believes visitors will be impressed by the warmth and authenticity of the local people and the sheer beauty of the Chinese countryside.
For the most part, this is not China’s side, whose government’s mastery of soft power has dazzled the wave of influencers who have taken over visa-free travel, which has now spread to more than 70 countries, including Australia.
They have flooded Instagram and TikTok with enthusiastic videos about China’s smartphone-powered megacities, a cashless economy, glittering skyscrapers, robots delivering food to hotel doors and futuristic electric vehicles cruising silently through clean streets.
The comparison is stark. Villages like Xingming have little material wealth but strong community ties. People eat what they grow, fish from the reservoir, and share what they have with their neighbors.
Some of the older generation speak sloppy Mandarin, preferring their own local dialect. This has tied them to their home state and increased language barriers for incoming foreigners, like me, relying on AI tools to navigate them. Although ChatGPT is an impressive translator, it struggles with dialects.
Meanwhile, young people migrate to cities in search of work, often leaving their children behind to be raised by their grandparents.
“My children went to work in the 3D printing industry,” says a woman picking beans from her garden while her grandson plays nearby.
But the crushing poverty that once afflicted Xingming and forced families like Li into poverty has been largely eliminated.
Getting to Xingming from Beijing requires a five-hour journey by bullet train to the nearest station in Yueyang, a small, lower-tier city by Chinese standards with a population of just 5 million (about the size of Sydney). Then it’s an hour’s drive through the countryside.
I came specifically to meet Li, a soft-spoken 36-year-old architect and aspiring artificial intelligence developer whose life is in many ways aligned with China’s recent trajectory.
He rose out of poverty on the back of China’s economic juggernaut, which has lifted up hundreds of millions of people like him since the 1990s. Li then rode the crest of the country’s real estate boom wave before collapsing, closing his own construction company within six months of opening it in 2022.
Since then, it has sought to reinvent itself primarily in e-commerce; joined a friend’s large online company that sells adult products to consumers around the world on platforms like Amazon and Taobao; It was a lucrative pivot that was particularly profitable in the U.S. market until U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war wreaked havoc on global supply chains.
Now dabbling in the emerging tech economy, he splits his time between Xingming and Shenzhen, a magnet for China’s entrepreneurial classes, where he teaches himself artificial intelligence and develops a small online game.
He also manages the hostel. The 14-bedroom homestay is a relatively new addition to Xingming, which he designed himself, overseeing construction in 2016 when China’s housing bubble spiraled out of control. To build it, he saved, saved, and borrowed money from friends in order to fulfill his parents’ dream of their son returning home and sharing his success with his family.
Its minimalist open-plan aesthetic, with its sharp lines, exposed brick, wood paneling and floor-to-ceiling glass windows, is a strikingly incongruous landmark in the tiny village.
It’s also an improvement that would go unnoticed in the simple brick apartment that once stood in the same spot, where his mother cooked on an open wood stove that doubled as heating. As a child, his family was too poor to buy a bicycle, so he and his brother walked two hours through the mountains to get to school; They made the trip twice a week, sleeping in the school zone in between.
“We could only eat meat a few times a year. As for clothes, we usually wore the same clothes for five or six years unless we got too big, literally,” he says.
“I think everyone in China has felt the economic growth, and people in the countryside have felt it very distinctly as well.
“If you had visited rural China 30 years ago, most of the rural areas basically did not have a single asphalt or tarmac road. All the toilets in the countryside were simple pit latrines. Our waste was used to fertilize vegetables.”
These days the roads are closed and the village has reliable electricity and sewage systems. Many of their neighbors have rebuilt larger, multi-story homes in recent years, and many families own at least one car.
Li’s ticket out was that he was academically talented, won a scholarship to study architectural design at university, and was supported by government policies that helped low-income families. He stepped into a greedy real estate market and at one point landed a well-paying job at Country Garden, China’s largest real estate developer.
Burdened with billions of dollars in debt, Country Garden has been on the verge of collapse since 2023. The crisis, along with the collapse of other major developers, drained China’s middle-class wealth and left an economic scar so deep that even the country’s groundbreaking AI industries have come nowhere near healing it.
When Li’s guesthouse first opened before the emergence of COVID-19, it was fully booked on weekends, but since then, the slow post-pandemic recovery and the downturn in the domestic economy have seen bookings dwindle as Chinese consumers turn to their savings.
I was the only guest during my stay last weekend, but the day I checked out more travelers arrived.
As China opens up to foreign tourists, Li hopes more will come to villages like Xingming.
“If you go to China, 70-80 percent of the places are like this. This place is also very beautiful. This is the real state of China, although big cities are also a real part of China.”
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Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Beijing. He was previously a federal political correspondent in Canberra.Connect with: X or email.
