Keys to Empty Ancestral Halls

China’s rural exodus created not only a demographic void but a moral one. The village endures as legal fiction and emotional duty—a place preserved by policy, emptied by design.

The Spring Festival migration is often called the largest annual human movement on earth—nine billion trips compressed into forty days. But the language of "return" obscures what actually happens. People are not truly going home, they are visiting the site where home used to be.

In villages across Anhui, Henan and Sichuan, houses stand empty eleven months a year. Ancestral halls gleam with fresh paint but echo with silence. The elderly who remain—often the only permanent residents—spend the year as custodians of a world their children have abandoned. Then, for two weeks in late January or early February, the village briefly flickers back to life. Migrants flood back from Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing and so on. They bring gifts, red envelopes and children who speak Mandarin instead of dialect; they perform reunions, stage acts of belonging and enact filial piety; then they leave again and the village returns to solitude.

In short, this is not a homecoming. It is the ritual confirmation that home no longer exists except as an obligation.

The contradiction is structural. The village is simultaneously a place of sacred origin and site of abandonment. People organize their identities through clan networks—marriages negotiated through village connections, funerals that require presence, business partnerships rooted in native ties. But nobody actually lives there. The hukou (户口) system legally binds people to villages they have spent their lives trying to escape, while the development model that governs China's political economy requires those villages to empty. Urbanization is the metric of progress; the countryside must depopulate for the cities to grow. Yet politically, the village remains the moral foundation of Chinese civilization—the answer to Western rootlessness, the site of authentic culture, the bedrock of Confucian ethics that the Party claims to preserve.

The state simultaneously empties villages and demands they stay alive. Policy produces abandonment, while rhetoric denies it. The result is a landscape of beautiful ruins, maintained and uninhabited, where people perform belonging.

The Architecture of Exodus

The rupture begins with the hukou system—the Maoist apparatus of population control that has outlasted the ideology that created it. Household registration determines where people can access education, healthcare and pensions, that is the entire infrastructure of citizenship. For the 300 million rural migrants working in cities, their hukou remains in villages they left decades ago. They are permanent residents of places they do not live, legal citizens of communities that no longer function, trapped in bureaucratic limbo between a village that cannot support them and a city that will not recognize them.

The result is a form of existential homelessness. A worker's ID lists a village that no longer exists as a functioning community. His daughter's school file says "temporary student" though she's never lived anywhere else. Their legal address is a fiction both can recite but neither can meaningfully inhabit. Migrants describe themselves as 城里没根, 乡下回不去 (chénglǐ méi gēn, xiāngxià huí bù qù, rootless in the city, cut off from the village). Their children, born in cities but denied urban hukou, attend inferior migrant schools or are sent back to villages to be raised by grandparents, then retrieved years later as strangers. The family fractures across generations and geographies, held together by remittances and annual visits that only emphasize the distance.

Yet people cannot fully sever the tie. The village plot—however small or unproductive—remains the only asset they legally own, the sole safety net if the city expels them. To sell land-use rights or abandon the hukou would be to accept permanent precarity. So they maintain the fiction: they are "from" the village, they will "return" someday, they are only temporarily elsewhere. The village becomes a legal anchor and an economic millstone, binding people to a place that exists primarily as a category of exclusion.

This was not accidental. China's development model required cheap, mobile, disposable labor—workers who could be summoned to coastal factories during boom years and expelled during downturns without urban welfare obligations. The hukou system provided the mechanism. It created a population that could be exploited in cities but never belonged to them, ensuring that the cost of social reproduction (raising children, caring for the elderly, managing unemployment) remained in the countryside even as the countryside hollowed out.

The system does more than immobilize labor, it moralizes immobility. It turns the village into a test of loyalty and the migrant's endurance into a measure of virtue—a moral logistics of containment. The countryside becomes both a labor reserve and a moral theater, proof that the people still "belong" somewhere even as policy ensures that belonging remains symbolic.

The Party now calls this "rural-urban integration" and frames the migrant experience as a transitional stage toward full urbanization. But transition implies arrival, and arrival never comes. The second generation is as excluded as the first. What was supposed to be temporary became permanent; what was framed as opportunity became a new structure of class.

The Generational Fracture

The rupture plays out differently across three generations, each inhabiting a different relationship to the village and experiencing the abandonment in distinct emotional registers. The grandparents—those now in their seventies and eighties—lived their entire lives within the village's moral and spatial order. They were born, married, raised children, and will be buried there. Their identity is inseparable from the land, the clan, the cycle of agricultural seasons and ritual obligations. For them, the village is not a place but a form of life—the only framework within which existence is legible.

These elderly remain as custodians of a world that no longer needs them. They maintain houses nobody lives in, tend ancestral graves nobody visits except twice a year, preserve traditions ever-fewer people are willing to inherit. Some local officials call them “waiting to die” (等死, děng sǐ). This is not cruelty but demographic fact: the village’s future is their funeral.

Yet they perform wellness and contentment when their children visit because to admit abandonment would make the children's guilt unbearable. The Spring Festival return becomes theater: the parents act grateful, the children act dutiful, and everyone pretends the arrangement is sustainable. The performance is mutual protection—against the admission that the family has fractured and cannot be repaired.

The middle generation—those now in their forties and fifties—carry the weight of the contradiction most acutely. They left the village not only because they had to (poverty, lack of opportunity, the collapse of rural industry in the 1990s) but because they wanted to (escape patriarchal control, clan surveillance, the stifling predictability of agricultural life). The city promised mobility, autonomy and modernity but delivered precarity.

Now they are trapped between two worlds, belonging fully to neither. They cannot return—there are no jobs, no schools for their children, and the social death of admitting failure. But they cannot fully leave either. Aging parents require care and money. Ancestral obligations demand presence. Their legal status keeps them second-class in the cities where they have spent most of their adult lives. They experience the village as both prison and refuge: the place they fled, and the only place that still recognizes them.

For this generation, the annual return is shot through with guilt, relief and resentment braided together. They bring gifts and red envelopes to compensate for absence. They listen to their parents' complaints and their siblings' judgments. They tour the empty primary school, the shuttered clinic, the fields gone to seed, and feel complicit in the ruin. Then they leave again, because staying is impossible, and the cycle repeats.

The children—those born in the 1990s and 2000s, raised partly in cities, partly by grandparents in villages—experience the ancestral home as a foreign country where they happen to have relatives. The dialect is incomprehensible, the food unfamiliar, the rituals (burning paper money, bowing to ancestors, the hierarchy of clan relationships) feel like someone else's superstition. They scroll their phones through New Year banquets, endure interrogations about jobs and marriage prospects, count the hours until they can leave.

Yet they are told this is their 根 (gēn, roots), their 老家 (lǎojiā, ancestral home), the source of their identity. The disconnect is profound and rarely articulated. How do you tell your parents that the place they are desperate for you to honor feels like a museum of someone else's history?

Fewer among this generation will bring their children back. The chain of return risks ending with them or their kids. They know it; their parents know it. But the knowledge remains unspoken, because to name it would be to admit the finality of the rupture. So they perform the rituals—lighting incense, sweeping tombs, sitting through banquets—while planning never to return except for funerals.

Curated Collapse

In 2013, Xi Jinping launched the 'Beautiful Villages' campaign as part of a broader rural revitalization strategy, itself built upon earlier, smaller-scale efforts such as the 'Green Rural Revival Program' Xi initiated in Zhejiang province. Billions of yuan have since flowed into model villages: roads repaved, houses renovated, "cultural centers" built, ancestral halls restored. The rhetoric is preservation—protecting the countryside as the moral and cultural bedrock of Chinese civilization—the reality is necromancy: renovating corpses for display.

These villages are designed to be visited, photographed, and then abandoned again. They function as rural theme parks, maintained for urban tourists who come to experience "authentic village life" without any of its deprivations. Visitors can buy artisanal pickles from vendors, eat "peasant food" in restaurants with health permits and wifi, and sleep in "traditional courtyard homes" with underfloor heating and smart toilets, while the actual peasants have been cleared out or converted into performers—elderly women in "traditional" costume demonstrating handicrafts they never actually practiced, alongside retired farmers hired to pose in fields for photographs.

In this warped world, villages become stage-sets for their own memory, existing less as living communities than as monuments to a rurality that urbanites can consume without inhabiting. The Party claims this as preservation of cultural heritage but what it preserves is not culture but its image—village life as aesthetic object; poverty as picturesque backdrop; abandonment as tourist attraction.

Local cadres understand the absurdity. In one Anhui village designated as a model site, officials spent vast sums renovating houses that are empty 340 days a year. When asked about the logic, a township party secretaries shrug, claiming "上面要看 (shàngmiàn yào kàn)—the higher-ups need something to see." The village exists for inspection tours, for journalists, for propaganda footage, its function is emphatically not habitation but representation—proof that the Party cares about the countryside, even as policy systematically abandons it.

Enter: livestreamers. Rural influencers have discovered that all this is monetizable, and are wont to film empty schoolhouses with desks still in rows, halls with faded Maoist slogans, old people eating alone in vast kitchens, overgrown temples and collapsed bridges and houses reclaimed by vegetation. The aesthetic is beautiful ruin—melancholic, carefully framed, accompanied by nostalgic captions about lost childhoods and fading traditions. Parallels can be found all over the world, not least Tyneham village in the U.K. for example, but not on such a scale.

The videos attract millions of views from urban audiences who comment thinks like "This is the real China," "I miss my grandmother's village," or "We've lost something precious." But the streamers are not advocating return or revival, they are selling the abandonment. The ruin becomes content; the loss becomes product. They use the village as a backdrop to hawk agricultural products—"real countryside honey," "grandmother's pickles," "pollution-free vegetables"—to urbanites who want to consume rurality without living it.

Some streamers are explicit about their role. They position themselves as archivists of a dying world, the last generation to remember village life before it disappears. One popular account, run by a woman in her thirties who returned to document her grandmother's final years, frames each video as preservation: "Recording these moments before they're gone forever." The grandmother—91, living alone, the last resident of a village that once held 600 people—has become an internet celebrity. Viewers watch her daily routine, comment on her meals, send virtual gifts that convert to real yuan. She is both subject and commodity, her isolation the very thing that makes her marketable.

The cruelty is quiet but totalizing. Streamers extract value from the same abandonment they claim to mourn, while viewers consume the spectacle of rural collapse as entertainment, their nostalgia a form of emotional tourism that requires no real engagement. The elderly left behind become content—their loneliness aestheticized; their abandonment repackaged as heritage; their final years broadcast to strangers who will never visit.

This is necro-pastoralism: the corpse of the countryside as consumable sentiment.

The Impossibility of Return

At funerals contradictions become unbearable.

When someone from the migrant generation dies—and they are beginning to die, the first cohort in their sixties now—the family faces an impossible question: where to bury them? The older generation still insists on burial in the ancestral village. This requires enormous expense (transporting the body, hosting multi-day rituals, hiring monks or Daoist priests, feeding hundreds of clan members and villagers), logistical nightmares (coordinating family scattered across provinces, navigating local burial regulations, securing a plot), and days of ritual that younger generations do not understand and increasingly resent.

Why do it? Because to be buried elsewhere—in an urban cemetery, or worse, cremated and scattered—would be to admit that the rupture is permanent, that they truly belonged nowhere, that they had severed the chain. The grave plot in the village is the last material proof that their life meant something within a framework larger than individual existence. It says: I came from somewhere; I was part of a lineage; my name will be remembered, not as an isolated individual but as a link in a genealogy that stretches back and (theoretically) forward into future generations.

But the children increasingly balk. They want cremation, urban cemeteries and simpler rituals. They do not want to inherit the obligation of maintaining a grave in a village they never visit. They do not believe in ancestor worship; do not feel bound by lineage; do not see why death should require expensive theater. For them, the insistence on village burial is not piety but superstition and a burden. The funeral becomes the site where generational rupture becomes undeniable. Families fracture over where to bury the dead, which is really a fight over whether belonging to the village still means anything, whether the continuity can be maintained or if it has broken beyond repair.

What Cannot Be Replaced

The English parallel is instructive. When England's villages emptied and the parish system collapsed over two centuries, people lost the encompassing social world that had organized birth, marriage, death, dispute resolution, mutual aid, seasonal rites, and social recognition. But that transformation happened slowly enough that alternative structures emerged: voluntary associations, urban neighborhoods, labor unions, eventually the welfare state. The church's social functions were gradually taken up by secular institutions. The village's moral order dissolved into other forms of community, though whether they are truly load-bearing remains moot.

China's transformation is happening at ten times the speed, and little has replaced what was lost. The village provided encompassing care—informal but total, surveilling but reliable. You were always watched but also always recognized; always obligated but also always protected. The clan would help with medical costs, job searches, marriage negotiations, childcare, elder care, dispute mediation. The city offers none of this. It demands individualism but provides no infrastructure for autonomous life. There are no robust unions, no independent civic associations, no welfare state that recognizes migrants as citizens. People are told to be self-reliant in a system designed to keep them precarious.

What results is not autonomy but anomie. Migrants live in cities where they have no political voice, no legal security, no social ties beyond coworkers they may never see again after the next layoff. They are mobile but unprotected, free but radically alone. The village at least promised belonging; the city promises only exposure.

And yet return is impossible. The village has no economy beyond subsistence agriculture and the occasional government project. There are no schools that could prepare children for anything beyond rural poverty. The social structure that once made village life bearable, even fun—the clan networks, the ritual calendar, the collective labor arrangements—has collapsed under the weight of depopulation. Those who remain are mostly elderly, increasingly frail, waiting for children who come twice a year.

The village cannot be revived because the conditions that sustained it—a large, stable, locally embedded population—no longer exist and cannot be recreated. You cannot reverse urbanization through nostalgia or policy. The world that the grandparents inhabited is gone. The question is not whether people will return but what will happen when even the rituals of return become impossible to sustain.

Qingming

A man in his early forties boards a bus in Hefei bound for a township three hours northwest. His twelve-year-old daughter sits beside him, earbuds in, watching something on her phone. It is Qingming Festival (清明节, Qīngmíng jié)—the annual day for sweeping tombs and honoring the dead. He has made this trip every year since his grandfather died when he was a child. His daughter has accompanied him since she was old enough to travel.

The village appears as it always does: a few dozen houses, most with shuttered windows and weeds growing in the courtyards. There are forty-three permanent residents now, he knows—the village committee secretary told him last year. Mostly people over seventy. His aunt, his father's cousin, a few others he recognizes only vaguely. The primary school closed a decade ago. The clinic closed five years ago. The nearest hospital is an hour away.

They walk to the family grave plot on a hillside overlooking fields gone to seed. His daughter carries the bundle of incense and paper money he bought from a vendor at the bus station. He kneels and begins arranging the offerings, showing her where to place each stick of incense. She follows his movements uncertainly, self-conscious, and occasionally glancing at her phone.

He asks if she remembers her great-grandfather, whose name is on the stone. She shakes her head—he died when she was three. Does she know why they do this? She shrugs. "To remember them," she says, a rote phrase. He wants to tell her more—about the family history, about what the village meant, about continuity and obligation and debt—but the words won't come. He does not know how to explain something he is not sure he believes in himself. He does this because his father did it, and his father's father. But his daughter will not bring her children.

They light the paper money. It curls and blackens, smoke rising and dispersing in the wind. The bus comes. They board. The village recedes behind them, maintained and meaningless, a place that exists now only as the site of its own abandonment. He wonders if he will bring her back next year. He probably will. And the year after that. Until one year he won't, and then it will be over, and no one will remember why it mattered in the first place.