With the traditional festival of Chinese New Year just around the corner, it's a time for most people to pack their bags and head home to reunite with their families. In some rural areas of China, however, a different atmosphere is permeating. Those familiar faces, those migrant workers who have worked hard in the city for a whole year, did not choose to return to their hometown, they chose to stay in the city to live, or to return to the new home they bought in the city.
This change reveals the hollowing out of the countryside. On the one hand, cities have a huge attraction to migrant workers with their bustling and cognitive pace of life, high-quality educational resources, advanced medical conditions and various living conveniences. On the other hand, it also reflects the bottlenecks in rural areas and the loss of young people. The hollowing out of rural areas not only affects the number of people, but also affects the traditional culture of rural areas, the progress of local economy, and the sense of community cohesion.
Another phenomenon that has to be mentioned is that most of the work in the fields is hard work by the gray-haired old people. The perennial loss of young labor has caused the problem of an ageing of agricultural workers. In the ordinary countryside, most of the workers in the fields are over sixty years old, and they maintain agricultural production in the traditional way, but new blood has not poured into the land.
Young people are gradually choosing to give up working in agriculture because they are attracted by the bustling life of the city, or because they value the hard work and the unequal benefits of agricultural work. This trend not only poses challenges to agricultural production, but also makes rural communities less dynamic and innovative. The problem of an ageing agricultural workforce cannot be delayed, otherwise it will have a long-term impact on the sustainable development of agriculture and the health of the rural economy.
It is worth criticizing that among the many problems in rural communities, the phenomenon of showing off and comparing causes people to fall into anxiety during the Spring Festival. Originally a happy time for family reunions, more people are now focusing on comparing who has a more luxurious car, a bigger house, and even the children's school and income.
This comparison leads to heavy psychological pressure and the financial situation of the family that may go bankrupt, and people forget the essence of life and the true meaning of family harmony in the pursuit of external superiority. This kind of excessive comparison and flaunting of wealth not only affects the happiness of individuals and families, but also leads to the deviation of the current social moral values and consumption outlook.
When these phenomena come together, it is clear that we see the challenges of transformation facing rural societies in China. The hollowing out of rural areas, the serious aging of the agricultural labor force, and the excessive pursuit and comparison of external materials are all challenges and problems that rural communities must face in the process of modernization. We urgently need to find ways to address these issues in order to achieve prosperity and progress for rural communities.