Deepening roots of understanding

When Cornell University student Abbie Jobe sat down for breakfast with her host family in Hebei province in January, she discovered that the peanuts and sweet potatoes on the table were grown by the family and shared with guests as part of everyday life.

"They gave us a lot of insight into how they practice subsistence farming and financially keep themselves stable," said Jobe, a senior majoring in agricultural sciences at Cornell in New York City.

Born and raised in New York, with family roots in Gambia in Africa, Jobe said the experience offered a perspective to classroom learning.

For Jobe and about a dozen fellow students and faculty members from Cornell, a two-week study trip across Beijing, Hebei and Sichuan provinces offered an immersive window into China's agricultural development and rural vitalization.

In Sanggang village, located in a mountainous area of Hebei's Yixian county, the students lived with local families, shared meals, observed farm work, and interviewed residents. Though only for three days, many said the experience revealed a side of China rarely seen in textbooks and news headlines.

Jobe's host family operates a small store near their home, and the father also works as a contract tiler. He returns to the community to share his skills with others who want to build their own houses.

To Jobe, this mutual support defines rural life in China. "The real essence of a rural livelihood is taking what you know and helping your neighbors grow," she said, contrasting it with what she described as a more "individualistic" approach in the US. "Here, people think about their neighbors. If they live a better life, you do too," she said.

That collective approach was highlighted in lectures by Ye Jingzhong, a professor at China Agricultural University, who has led research and fieldwork in Yixian for more than three decades. His team's work began in the late 1990s, when it supported basic infrastructure projects such as water supply and road construction.

After 2010, the team introduced the concept of "nested markets", reconnecting urban consumers directly with smallholder farmers. The program helped increase farmers' incomes while preserving small-scale agriculture and later drew national attention as an early form of consumption-based poverty alleviation.

Dallas Selle, a master's student in global development at Cornell, said the lecture and observations helped her better understand China's rural policies. "Land reform was the foundation," she said.

Giving rural villagers land was essential for sustaining their livelihoods. Then infrastructure created the basis for everything else, including culture, nested markets, and long-term development, she said.

China's approach differs from the US. "There's a stronger focus here on lifting entire communities together, starting from lower-income villages," she said.

When interviewing local residents, Gio Rodriguez, a senior studying global development, focused on the movement of rural labor. Rodriguez said he was struck by the outward migration pattern from the village and the gender dynamics that accompanied it. In the household he visited, the male of the family traveled to Beijing for months at a time for work, leaving his wife to manage affairs on her own.

Coming from a Mexican background, he said such an arrangement would often raise safety concerns, as women living alone for extended periods can be more vulnerable in Mexico. Observing how the family in the village navigated these dynamics offered him a different angle on how rural households adapt and maintain stability amid labor migration.

"This kind of rural-to-urban flow exists in both China and Latin America, though the cultural contexts differ," he said, adding that solutions like the Sanggang's nested market could offer insights beyond China.

Nor Anisa, a master's student in global development at Cornell University, said she would like to apply the participatory approaches she learned in Sanggang village when she returned to her hometown in Indonesia.