Young men head for cities to make money, leaving the old to do farm work. [Ma Weiwu / for China Daily]

Traveling through remote country fields and flat houses, two city slickers come face to face with the harsh truths of China's changing rural landscape

村子里的年轻人都不见了

The sound of pounding hooves and shouting erupted behind us. Leia - my fiancee - and I were on a lonely road somewhere in China's vast rural Northeast.

Any company was unexpected company. A hefty pig zipped past us, sprinting up the road. Moments later, a farmer scurried by.

"Mongrel!" He yelled as the pig broke left and bounded into the open fields. Soon, it disappeared over the horizon, with its owner still in hot pursuit.

Leia and I had come to Kedong over the October holidays so she could apply for a passport. Leia now lives in Beijing, but her hukou is still tied to this rural hamlet in northeastern Heilongjiang province, where she grew up.

Most administrative processing, for things like passports and national ID cards, is done exclusively in the place where your hukou is registered.

Kedong county is a collection of farming villages radiating out from the town of Kedong itself. "Downtown" Kedong feels like a city.

It is arranged in neat urban blocks, with apartment high-rises shooting up all around.

A short walk from the center, the clusters of tall buildings flatten into rows of pingfang - traditional one-story houses, literally flat houses. These houses soon give way to miles and miles of black soil, tilled into orderly rows.

The harvest had come and gone. The fields were mostly empty. Farmers had already sold their takes and were settling in for a long winter of mahjong and other idle activities.

A half hour's drive out of Kedong lies Jinxing. It is the village Leia grew up in before her family migrated to the town.

The taxi rolled along narrow country roads, occasionally pulling over to make way for tractors towing loads of dried plants. This area is famous for soybeans, and after the beans are harvested, the plant's remains are dried and burned as fuel during the winter.

When we arrived in Jinxing, we got out of the car to make our way around on foot.

It was a beautiful day, clear and warm (for a northern fall). The air was fresh and the sky bore a brilliant shade of blue. In all directions, tilled black earth reached into the horizon, dotted by haphazard splashes of color where the trees were turning golden red. There was hardly a person in sight.

We ambled slowly up the road. In the distance, farmers climbed the rolling fields in their tractors. I expected that a foreigner carrying a large camera into a little village would cause a stir. There just were not that many people around to take notice. Chickens, goats and ducks gave us odd looks as they wandered the streets, but aside from a few old men, there was almost no one around.

"Where are all the people?" I asked a couple of aging smokers on the roadside.

"Gone to the city to find work," one said. "The harvest is over. They cannot make enough to live on just by farming these days. So they move to the city during the winter."

Up the road, an old man stopped us, "Are you doctors?" He was sick, he said, and he looked it. He earns a few hundred yuan each year leasing out his farmland and the government provides 800 yuan in social security. His children, all of them away, chip in another 100 yuan-200 yuan a year.

"It's enough to live, but not comfortably," the old man said.

Shortly after we spoke to him, we witnessed the great pig escape.

"Do you think he'll catch it?" I asked Leia. "Of course," she said.

There are precious few children left in Jinxing now. The school has closed; the children go to boarding school in Kedong instead. With the harvest over, the few young adults that live here were searching for work in the city.

Jinxing was now a defunct retirement village, with not enough doctors but plenty of ailing elderly.

During our Jinxing excursion, we came across only one young farmer. He was a friend of Leia; in fact, he had lived with her family for several months while his parents were away.

It was a friendly reunion, but also an awkward one. They grew up together, but they had little in common now. Apart from the past, there was little to talk about.

The next day, we set out for another village to help Leia's cousin sort his potato crop. For our troubles, he would give us a few free sacks.

Every now and then, villagers dropped by. Some bought potatoes, loading sacks into tractors and carting them away. Others sold things. One man rode up on a motorcycle and opened the back compartment to reveal hundreds of frogs. Cousin was delighted and bought more than 30.

In the afternoon, we explored the village. It was tiny, like Jinxing, and nearly as deserted.

There were people at Cousin's house, but most had been invited to help with the harvest. Here, too, the streets were empty, save for the odd wandering goat.

But this village had something Jinxing did not: a two-story building. As we approached, a chicken bolted across the path in front of us. The building was empty. It had been a medical facility, but now there was nothing in it but grain and broken glass left on window sills.

In Kedong each farmer owns an equally small parcel of land. The individual plots are not large enough to make a good living; even four or five plots pooled together would leave a family struggling to get by. Hopeful farmers now rent land from others, or, if they cannot find land nearby, they are driven into the cities for work.

It seems that as much as city streets paved with gold pull in rural residents, the country and the land are pushing the farmers away.

Like so many others in Kedong, our stay there was temporary. With the vacation ending and Leia's passport paperwork turned in, we said goodbye to her parents and boarded a bus to the city.

That day, there were so many people leaving Kedong that all the regularly scheduled buses were filled. Extra buses were added to meet the demand. Together, we squeezed into the vehicle and headed toward the city. Behind us, the station emptied as the last passengers of the day filed onto another extra bus. The roads were quiet.

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com

The World of Chinese