Like many rural youth across China, Shi Qiuxiang left her remote farming village to find a modern job in the city. Years later, she was among an expanding group who returned home to transform not only their own lives but their villages.
Because of family issues, Shi gave up a management job at a pharmaceutical firm in the metropolitan city of Shenzhen and returned to her hometown, a small village in Miao Autonomous County of Rongshui, southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
"I can still recall how out of place I felt when I first returned in 2013," the 32-year-old said. "Suddenly I had to start everything over again."
With no experience in traditional farming, Shi tried to make full use of her knowledge and six-year working experience in the medical industry.
Her small firm, under the brand "Qiuye's Home," started to process and sell Lingzhi mushrooms, a valuable ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, in 2014. A year later, Shi set her eye on another local specialty -- sweet potatoes, which is said to embody "a taste of childhood."
Shi's Lingzhi business quickly secured a share in the local market with increasing orders from big drug stores. Thanks to e-commerce and social network platforms, Lingzhi mushrooms and fresh sweet potatoes from Qiuye's Home achieved sales of 14 million yuan (2.06 million U.S. dollars) in 2018, with overseas orders reaching as far as Hong Kong and Australia.
Her business has brought opportunities to local villagers, especially those living below the poverty line.
"Planting sweet potatoes is quite a light and profitable job for old people and women in rural areas. Last year we had 426 households as suppliers and 231 of them were poor families," she said.
Last year, her company was listed as a leading company in combing e-commerce with poverty alleviation by the local government.
Millions of young migrant workers from rural areas to cities have greatly fueled China's economic growth in the past four decades, but the outflow of labor has also caused social problems in their hometowns, leaving only the elderly to take care of farming and small children left behind.
The Chinese government has been supporting rural youth to start their own businesses at home and introduce new agricultural and business models, with a raft of favorable financial policies, training sessions and services.
Youth who return home not only bring modern ideas to once isolated traditional communities but help alleviate poverty. For some of them, it is also their aspiration and a need to reconnect with their root.
Unlike Shi in Guangxi, when folk musician Sha Che returned to his home village in southwest China's Yunnan from the provincial capital Kunming in 2017, he was happy and felt "truly home."
Sha's home village Zhalyu is in Jinuo Township of Jinghong City in Yunnan, and home to a small ethnic minority group called Jinuo.
The 33-year-old worked for a music production company in Kunming after he graduated from college. "Although I was starting to make money, I was very homesick and decided to go back to accompany my parents," he said.
Sha tried to link Jinuo people's traditional Pu'er tea planting with the trendy business of ecological tourism, by opening his family tea plantation to tourists. "People from big cities can see our moon and experience our farm work," he said.
Sha and his tea guesthouse even made it onto a popular online reality show "Wild Kitchen" last October, where he served as the guide for the pop stars on the program.
Having attracted over 110 million views, the show brought fame to Sha and many came to Zhalyu for Jinuo cuisine and music.
"It feels like a mission for me to introduce our music and culture to the world. My steps might be slow, but eventually I will get there," he said.
