Twilight of the County Towns: A Veiled China

I went back to my hometown today. Desolation everywhere — autumn wind, autumn rain, the season grinding the spirit down. Hardly any of the shops along the street were still open, the neon-and-liquor glow of years past has vanished who knows where, and the elementary school I once attended has been shut down.

The real China is not on the evening news, nor in the movies and TV dramas. It lives in the county towns and townships whose names you have never even heard. There are no spectacles there, only ordinary days.

City people once had a slogan: flee Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, go back to your hometown. So what does life in those hometowns look like now?

Three roads — two and a half of them blocked dead.

The factories are going under. Like little fish at ebb tide, every one that could leave has left, for lower-lying ground — cheaper labor, cheaper land, more generous governments. All that remains in the counties and townships are rusted smokestacks and the tax bureau’s empty ledgers.

Real estate is hibernating. The tower builders have stopped, the brick sellers stand baffled, the renovation crews have dispersed, the furniture malls have locked their gates. When the bubble burst, it was the people on shore who drowned.

On the streets of the county towns, prime shops sit with transfer signs in whole rows, and the underground malls have gone back to being air-raid shelters. E-commerce doesn’t come like a flood; it works like a straw. You never feel it arrive — you only feel the money leaving. The young buy jackets on Douyin, phones on Pinduoduo, and order in for dinner. The money flows to Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing — to algorithms and platforms. This is not a siphon. It is blood being drawn.

When young people flee the big cities and return to the county towns, they expect to drop back in and run circles around the place, to lead a hometown revival. But the local wages land like a slap that leaves them reeling — and off they hurry again, tumbling head over heels, straight back to the cities.

“Jobs are scarce, wages are pitiful, the future is hopeless — just muddling through and waiting to die.” That is not complaining; that is fact. Young people lying flat is not a choice — it is a result. The capable ones test out, move out, get out. Who is left is mostly the ones eating the government’s rice.

How big is a county town? By population — several hundred thousand, a few million; whatever the number, by power it is really just two or three hundred people who all know one another. They form three concentric circles, nested like Russian dolls, one layer inside the next.

The innermost circle is the officials. The top leader holds the power of appointments and the power of the purse — nearly absolute. Power so great it turns the post into a high-risk occupation. The executive deputy head of the Organization Department, the executive deputy secretary of the Discipline Inspection Commission, the executive deputy chief of the Public Security Bureau — these are the ones who actually call the shots. Their circle is sealed shut by marriage alliances and nepotism, and outsiders can barely find the door.

The middle circle is the businessmen. In a county town, getting rich requires wearing “red gloves.” Businessmen put up the money to build industrial parks, manufacturing political achievements for officials; officials pay them back with subsidies. That is where the half-finished parks and the empty factory shells come from. They were never meant for production — they were meant for promotion.

The outermost circle is the gray-market brokers. Not gangsters — the lubricant between black and white. Where the police run short, they keep order; where disputes resist resolution, they act as arbiters. Their businesses are thoroughly traditional: monopolize building materials, control passenger transport, run entertainment venues. They are the shadow of power — and power’s patch.

Public finance is a magic trick. A few hundred million in annual revenue, a few billion in spending; the gap is papered over with transfer payments and borrowing, and many counties cannot even cover the interest. In Guizhou there is Dushan County, which buried itself under 40 billion yuan of debt building the “No. 1 Shuisilou under Heaven.” That is not development — it is performance art. They played the game too far, and the county party secretary and the county magistrate both fell.

In the end, only three kinds of people can still make money: the ones who run restaurants, the ones who teach, the ones who practice medicine.

Restaurants live off civil servants — the only consumer group in a county town with steady money. Teaching lives off students: one good middle school can pull in families from all around, renting flats, moving in to shepherd the kids through school, spending — propping up half the town. Medicine lives off patients. The four characters on the sign, “People’s Hospital,” are a business that never fades.

The vast majority of county towns will never revive — they will only evolve. In ten or twenty years, many counties will be merged, or left to fade away on their own, like the villages before them. But that is not necessarily failure. Perhaps we should not insist that every county town industrialize. The Northeast can return to farming; the Southwest can focus on tourism. “Poetry, wine, and fields” is not a step backward — it is clear sight.

Not every place needs to become Shenzhen. Some places are destined never to keep the lights — only to keep the moonlight.