China Focus: Rice a witness to changing times

NANNING, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) — The paddy fields located on a mountain in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region once only produced rice for locals. Today, they have become a unique tourism resource.
It is said that the Longji Rice Terraces were first discovered by backpackers in the 20th century, when they saw the cascading rice terraces coiled in the karst mountains at an altitude of several kilometers and proclaimed them to be one of the most wonderful sights in the world.
Despite this story, they have truly evolved into a world-class tourist attraction thanks to the continuous efforts of locals over the past decade.
The terrace fields were already in existence during the Qin Dynasty (221 B.C.-207 B.C.), said Pan Baoyu, former Party branch secretary of Dazhai Village in the Longsheng Ge Autonomous County, who first protected and developed the terraces. From the 1980s, many young people chose to leave the village for work due to low farming incomes, and the large terraced fields were abandoned, Pan said.
“At that time, we thought that the rice farming methods handed down from our ancestors could not be abandoned. And we could rely on the unique terraced landscape to develop tourism so that the village could have a way out,” Pan said.
Around 2008, the village organized voluntary farming teams, and village officials took the lead in helping poor families and unemployed locals to cultivate the terraced fields and pass on ancient rice farming skills. It also cooperated with a company on tourism development.
In 2019, 1.5 million visits were made to the Longji Rice Terraces from within China and abroad. In 2022, Dazhai Village was named among the Best Tourism Villages of 2022 by the World Tourism Organization for its breathtaking agricultural views.
In February 2024, the village held its annual tourism dividend conference, and 282 households won a total of 7.25 million yuan (about 1.02 million U.S. dollars) in year-end bonuses, with households receiving an average of more than 25,000 yuan.
China is the birthplace of rice culture. The earliest artificially cultivated rice was grown 10,000 years ago, and was discovered at the Yuchanyan site in Daoxian County, central China’s Hunan Province, located more than 200 kilometers from Longsheng.
Today, China is the world’s largest rice producer, with 60 percent of its population eating rice as a staple food.
Experts say that rice culture, which originated in southern China, is one of the core elements of the Chinese civilization, not only supporting economic and social development but also influencing philosophy, art and other areas.
Xiaogang Village in east China’s Anhui Province has been dubbed “the cradle of China’s rural reform.” In 1978, 18 farmers in the village took a risk in signing a secret agreement to contract collective land to individual households.
In 1979, Guangxi also started to promote a household contract responsibility system, which was widely implemented in the first half of 1982. Reform first helped people of all ethnic groups in Guangxi tackle the problem of acquiring food and clothing, and later eliminated absolute poverty in the region’s rural areas.
Thanks to a targeted poverty alleviation strategy implemented in 2013, which included poverty alleviation through tourism development, Dazhai Village was lifted out of poverty in 2015 and the Longsheng Ge Autonomous County bid farewell to poverty in April 2019.
The super hybrid rice cultivated by scientist Yuan Longping, the “father of hybrid rice,” has not only helped solve the food problems of the Chinese people, but also made great contributions to solving the same problems facing humankind. Yuan had visited Longsheng and conducted experiments in the fields there.
Dazhai no longer plants traditional high-stalk rice, but late-maturing high-quality hybrid rice. This rice has a full growth period of 150 days and has higher yields, and its harvest time can be delayed until the end of October, giving visitors more time to enjoy the beauty of the terraces.
“We use drones to monitor the growth of rice, and it has become a consensus among villagers that we should protect the terraced fields,” said Pan Dexiong, a villager who quit his job in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, in 2012 and returned to Dazhai. Three years later, he opened a bed and breakfast business. “The occupancy rate can be 80 percent in the peak season. I also opened a restaurant and the annual income is up to 500,000 yuan,” he said.
Many young people like Pan Dexiong have returned home to farm their own land and find a new way to get rich.
Rice has also been used more broadly. In the 1980s, with the recovery of the private economy, individual merchants in Guangxi’s Liuzhou created Luosifen, a rice noodle dish, which sells well in China and has been exported to 28 countries and regions.
In the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County, rice elements are often integrated into ethnic paintings and embroidery works. These art works have been displayed and sold in the U.K., Japan and the Republic of Korea, among other countries.
“Reform and opening-up has given people of all ethnic groups the same goal, and on the road of high-quality development, people want to pull together all their efforts,” said Meng Yunlong, an official of Longsheng.
Dazhai Village has also become the “sister village” of a village in Laos, helping locals there plant rice and sharing methods to gain wealth through tourism development. ■