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Alec Ash is a writer and editor focused on China. Currently, he edits China Books Review, a literary review about China co-published by The Wire China and Asia Society. From 2008 to 2022, he lived in China, and he previously edited the China Channel at the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2016, he published Wish Lanterns, a book following the lives of six young Chinese people in Beijing. This year, Ash published The Mountains are High, a reported memoir which follows city escapees, including himself, who left places like Beijing or Shanghai and moved to Dali, a town in southwest China. In this interview, we spoke about his new book, what the trend of reverse migration tells us about today’s China, and the false promise of utopias.

Q: Let’s start with the basics: where is Dali and how would you explain it to someone who knew nothing about it?

A: Dali is an alpine valley in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan. It is geographically close to the borders of Myanmar and Laos, and the border of political Tibet lies to its northwest. There is a historic old town and various villages, and a 40 kilometer-long lake in the valley called Lake Er, which is a homophone for “ear”, as the lake is shaped like a giant ear. Stretching along the western border of the lake is a small mountain range called Cangshan, literally the “verdant mountains”, as they are evergreen conifers.

This particular mountain valley has developed into something of a backpackers retreat, and more recently, over the last five to ten years, has seen a real influx of internal migrants moving there from China’s big cities to seek a more rural refuge and simpler ways of life, in something akin to China’s ‘back to the land’ movement, living in villages dotted around the valley and the various farmlands near the old town. The valley itself has its own history and its own ethnic minority, the Bai people, but it’s become a destination for outsiders to move in, and somewhat of a hub for China’s counterculture.

Your book includes many different characters who decided to take part in this reverse migration movement. Can you talk about the different types of people and some examples of the different motivations you heard from them?

The book traces one year of life in the village I lived in, according to the Chinese calendar, from 2020 to 2021, or the year of the Rat. Woven through that year that I spent in this particular village are the stories of various other migrants to the valley of Dali who arrived from all four corners of the nation, coming from very different backgrounds and of all ages. They fundamentally shared a similar motivation for moving to the valley, namely, to escape the honk and the buzz of China’s big cities, to find a simpler way of life, alternative ways of being. Each was on their own quest for something slightly different, escaping the pressure of high-paced careers and the quest to make money. 

There were various people who were there after pursuing careers in the cities who had got burnt out. There were also younger people who were disillusioned with modern China and wanted to have more of a hippie-adjacent existence. There were the escaping middle classes, the yuppies, various spiritual seekers, environmentalists and survivalists, parents seeking alternative education models for their children, some political dissidents, some ravers and hedonists, various retirees looking for the simple life. So, really, it represents all corners of society bound together by a common disillusionment with modern urban China. That’s where the title of the book comes from: “the mountains are high” is the first half of a Chinese proverb that ends, “the emperor is far away”. So it speaks to themes of seclusion and refuge, escape and self-exile. 

Why is the movement happening now?

If I may meander upstream in answer to your question, I’ll take us back 15 years, which is when I started engaging in China as a fresh graduate. 

When I first moved to Beijing, it was 2008, the summer of the Olympics. There was a real ambition and hopefulness in the air, and a lot of Chinese moving from the country to the cities: China was at the peak of its urbanization. That sort of go-getter city attitude was the theme of my first book about China, Wish Lanterns, which followed six young Chinese people born after 1985, who had moved to Beijing to try and make it in the city — and that came out in 2016. 

2017 was an inflection point in China’s recent development. That was when Xi Jinping declared that he was running for a third term, or at least removing the term limits on leadership. I felt a certain disillusionment creeping into Chinese society that grew until the 2020 pandemic. A lot of Chinese people living in the cities felt disillusioned by the promise of economic development translating into personal fulfillment. In 2020 we saw the earliest instances of buzzwords like neijuan or involution, meaning a feeling of being wrapped up in the system and unable to progress; and its sibling tangping or lying flat, which is a solution to opt-out of the system. In its most extreme form, that opting-out means moving out of the cities. 

China has compressed into 50 years what took the West 250 years to achieve… A lot of stories of these escapees to Dali embodied that larger national story of self-questioning that comes with such radical and fast change. 

So we were seeing almost a reversal of the trend for the last decades of urbanization and the promise of the cities. And we began to see a trickle in the reverse direction. It’s important to note at this point that I’m talking about very much a minority: China continues to urbanize. But in recent years, the trickle has become a stream and it’s become a social trend that people are familiar with, to leave one of the big cities of Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou and move to a rural place like Dali. I was fascinated that after decades of breakneck urbanization and development, there was this minority of reverse migrants who were pushing back against the trend, and I found it emblematic of these broader changes that I was observing, having lived in the country for the last decade plus. 

Left: Alec Ash’s home in Silver Bridge village, Dali. Right: Dali at sunset. Images courtesy of Alec Ash.

So I followed the same trend myself at the beginning of 2020. I moved to Dali and rented a courtyard home in a village near the mountains, and began researching what became the book.

What led you to make the move to Dali?

Well, the book is in part reportage about a particular corner of China and a particular facet of its recent development. But the other half of the book is personal memoir, and I did hope that the work would have more universal themes and resonances for readers. At the beginning of 2020, I also went through a breakup and was in need of some change in my life. Having lived in Beijing for the last seven years, I was a bit fed up with the traffic and the noise and pollution and all of the toxins that accumulate in the liver of the soul from city living. And the political trajectory of the country was also a factor in my disillusionment, as was the fact that the city authorities were tearing down my apartment in the hutongs. While I was talking to the other escaping urbanites in Dali, I found that I shared many of the same reasons for moving, and could identify with a lot of what they were talking about, albeit coming from a very different background myself. 

Many of the characters and scenes you describe, for example the raves in fields outside of Dali with psychedelics, don’t fit with how we think of China. Why was it interesting or important to you to write about this very idiosyncratic enclave, or subculture, in China?

I think you can learn a lot about a country through its outliers. The stories that I tell in the book are not indicative of mainstream society. In fact, many of the people in my interviews specifically identify as fei zhuliu, or anti-mainstream. These are people who intentionally escaped some of the conventions of Chinese society to flee to the hills. I found it fascinating to learn about what it was that they were dissatisfied with. 

Left: Some of the new Dali migrants. Right: A torch festival held in the village. Images courtesy of Alec Ash.

I think there was a universal desire to be closer to nature, and to explore personal growth in whatever form it came, whether that’s from experimental lifestyles, raves, or just the simple life. What the people in the book shared felt like an individual microcosm of a bigger question that I was wondering about regarding China: now that China’s economy has developed and the nation is more powerful, and many of its individuals are materially more well-off, what now? A lot of people are asking, we’re rich, but are we happy? Many of them shared this idea that instead of buying into economic development or career development, they should be seeking personal development. 

China has compressed into 50 years what took the West 250 years to achieve, namely going through such breakneck industrial and economic growth. It’s taken only three generations for the nation to go from agrarian society to post-industrial urban malaise. A lot of stories of these escapees to Dali embodied that larger national story of self-questioning that comes with such radical and fast change. 

Were there still things that these city escapees had to contend with about the broader state, either politically, economically, or personally, while trying to escape to Dali?

Very much so. It was a false escape. And like all utopias, it’s a false utopia. What I found is that once they move to these seemingly idyllic places, a lot of the new migrants found that they face the same challenges that they did in the city, whether it is an economic challenge because it’s difficult to make money in a rural area; or a mental challenge in which they had felt dissatisfied in the city, moved location as a sort of geographic cure, only to find that their minds had traveled with them, and that there was no magic pill that would instantly grant them personal fulfillment. 

I got the impression it was more of an experimentation, as it was for myself, in changing location and trying out different modes of life. Many people I found moved to Dali with the intention of making it their ‘forever home’, and then after a few years they moved back to the city because they found that they actually wanted to pursue career opportunities after all, or return to mainstream society, which is what I did after three years of living in Dali and finishing the book. I eventually left China and now I live in New York.

I was curious about the authorities in Dali when I was reading the book. You talk about the cycle of crackdowns, and how it is far stricter now then before, but how do they view Dali becoming this haven, and how are they allowed to take a more laissez faire approach to some rules, like drug laws?

This is the great paradox at the heart of the Dali experiment: that the new arrivals were trying to find personal freedoms in a fundamentally unfree country. Just ten years ago, or especially further back, the hippies of Dali were really able to live off the grid, according to accounts I heard. Today that’s no longer possible. Decades ago, for example, I was told that people could smoke marijuana openly in the streets — marijuana grows wild in the hills of Dali, and the police either didn’t know what it was or didn’t care. That’s no longer the case. China has a very strict drug policy, of course, and the authorities very much cracked down on that and pushed it out. 

So those people in Dali who are trying to find those kinds of freedoms come increasingly up against the brick wall of the state, which has now reached into these previously remote areas. Dali, and indeed all of Yunnan province, used to be less strictly regulated and also more of a hotbed of regional corruption among the officials. Now in Xi Jinping’s China, that corruption and that uniqueness has been done away with, and central policy is being much more strictly enforced on the fringes of the nation. 

So what I really was witnessing was the tail end of this phenomenon, where there were pockets of real counterculture movements and freedoms in the nation. Increasingly, those pockets don’t exist, and are impossible, even in places like Dali. 

So is this group just going to be pushed out to a different place? Or does this mean that this sort of place is no longer acceptable in any part of China?

It’s important to note that as well as politics being a factor, gentrification is an equally large, if not a larger factor. As the valley became more touristy, a lot of the hippies, for example, were priced out of the old town and now are going further afield or further north to places like Shaxi, and up the bends of the Yangtze. 

I was interested in this in part because of the Western parallels, with, say, Woodstock. The difference is that China as a nation as a whole, at this point in its history, has made it clear that it doesn’t want any form of counterculture. We’ve really seen a drive to standardize not just policy and its enactment, but also the way that homes and businesses look at the fringes of the nation, and with standardized languages spoken. The power of that political headwind being blown out of Beijing is so strong that I do wonder if a meaningful counterculture will be able to survive it. Many people have been choosing not just to leave Dali, but to leave China itself. 

How was your experience of Covid different from someone in Beijing? And do you think that the experience of being stuck in the city during something like Covid could have accelerated this movement to reverse migrate?

It absolutely did. I moved to Dali in January 2020, when I had no idea that the pandemic was going to hit. That happened to be very fortunate timing for me personally, because when Covid did shut everything down, I was in a beautiful countryside courtyard with my vegetable patch and spring water, and free to roam in the mountainside just outside my front door. In Dali, we had one month of lockdown in February 2020, which was then lifted in March, and no cases were logged after that for the next two years. I feel a little bit guilty to say it, but I sort of missed the pandemic. Dali became a much more attractive prospect for people who wanted to get out of cities. The pandemic very much was a catalyst to accelerate this existing trend and it really made it mainstream. 

As the pandemic continued, I did notice more people arriving specifically as sort of internal pandemic refugees. I remember one couple who left Shanghai on the day that the lockdown was lifted in 2022, drove to Dali and lived in a tent in a field before eventually building a structure there. Not only did the disadvantages to city living become much more apparent during the pandemic and its lockdowns: I think as a whole, the pandemic response in China really made clear and exaggerated some of the trends and some of the dissatisfactions about society and politics as a whole. Even though the pandemic is now over in China, I think some of those dissatisfactions linger.

Especially in the Shanghai lockdown in 2022, we saw a swathe of Chinese society which is well off and privileged realizing that, for all of their wealth and privilege, that doesn’t protect them against living in the political system that they do, where they are at the whim of sometimes capricious government policy and have no recourse against it. The quest to escape that drives some to places like Dali, drives others to leave the nation entirely, and drives the majority probably just to grumble quietly and get on with life.

Why did you decide to leave Dali, and China, entirely? 

It was simply time. I had lived in China for 10 years. And for two years before that, I was a student of Chinese in Beijing, so twelve years in total. Over the pandemic, I didn’t leave Yunnan province. I didn’t get on a single train or plane for three years, or really leave my village. So by the end of 2022, I was itching for something new. 

My fear is that China is becoming somewhat of an abstraction to outside observers… The human stories are essential to remind us that this is a country which deserves to be understood with human empathy.

I’d also felt a personal dissatisfaction with the direction the country has been going in, from that really buzzing, exciting time of the Olympics through to the other end of the spectrum, the pandemic, where there was stagnancy in the air. So it felt like a good time to leave and explore something new all over again. I also felt that I’d been getting tunnel vision in China a bit too much. 

I’m still professionally engaged with China, editing a wonderful website, which is published by The Wire China and Asia Society, called China Books Review, which has thoughtful, intelligent commentary on all things China and bookish. I’m very much enjoying continuing to China watch but from a great distance now. And I continue to make trips to the country.

This type of book, which is about a specific slice of life in China and is deeply reported on the ground, is getting rarer these days. So many of the books I read about China now are about grand strategy or geopolitics. What is the impact of not having books like this one?

I hope that’s not the case, but I fear it may be, simply because there are fewer journalists and freelancers left in China to write that kind of book on the ground. There is a spate of such books coming out this year, such as Peter Hessler’s, Yuan Yang’s, and Ed Wong’s. But ever since the expulsion of journalists, there are fewer boots on the ground — or pens on the ground. So a lot of China books, which is a space I watch very closely, are being written at a distance. 

The risk is that we’re losing more of a human perspective on the country. I find it so valuable to remind readers that this is a nation comprised of individuals, each with their foibles and fears and dreams, and a great diversity of opinions and stories which have nothing to do with macro policy. My fear is that China is becoming somewhat of an abstraction to outside observers, or seen as something homogenous. The human stories are essential to remind us that this is a country which deserves to be understood with human empathy.

To end on a hopeful note, I very much hope to see a continued rise in native Chinese voices writing fluently in English or being translated into English. I hope to see more of them telling their own stories about their own country, so it is not just from foreign perspectives. I hope that they have the opportunities and the political space to tell those stories from within the nation themselves, because so much of our knowledge now comes from outside it.

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