The future of rural culture

Beyond questions of institutional activation, attention at the workshop turned to how rural space itself is measured, interpreted, and ultimately made visible in policy and planning systems.

"In rural development today, we rely heavily on indicators," says Wang Sha, deputy director of the Research Institute of Better China Initiative at the China Academy of Art. "Road construction, tourism numbers, investment data, infrastructure completion — these are important, but they are not enough."

During fieldwork, Wang says she has visited villages where new guesthouses, paved roads and public squares had transformed the landscape, yet longtime residents still felt disconnected from the places they once knew.

In some villages, old gathering spaces disappeared beneath standardized landscaping. In others, farming rhythms gradually gave way to tourism schedules and livestream-friendly redesigns.

"What disappears is sometimes not a building, but a way of sensing place," she says.

Wang says her team has been documenting local stories, daily practices and sensory memories alongside conventional planning data.

"The question is not only who builds rural space," she says. "It is whether people still have the right to perceive it and define it from within their own experience."

Against the backdrop of mounting global challenges, participants noted that rural vitalization through culture is evolving from a localized practice into a broader intellectual and social movement.

The concern over how rural transformation is framed and standardized finds another perspective in Tran Thi Thuy, deputy director of the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences.

Tran says Vietnam's countryside has changed rapidly in recent years through infrastructure expansion, digital technology and tourism development.

But she notes that many Vietnamese people still associate the idea of "home" with rural imagery — banyan trees, village wells and childhood memories of rice fields.

"Many people still feel that a hometown must be connected to the countryside," she says.

She cautions against reducing rural modernization to a single formula.

"Villages are not only spaces of production," Tran says. "They are also spaces of memory, kinship and belonging."

Red dots crowded the screen as Wang Fang, a professor at Peking University's College of Architecture and Landscape, projected a map tracing traditional villages across river valleys, mountain corridors and historical farming regions.

She revealed an unsettling reality at the gathering: villages are disappearing faster than many protection systems can document them.

"Some villages vanish before researchers even arrive," Wang Fang says. "By the time they enter official surveys, they may already be empty or fundamentally altered."

Her team has been experimenting with data-driven monitoring systems that combine heritage records, satellite imagery, ecological data, and even ancient tree registries to identify villages that may be at risk before decline becomes irreversible. The goal, she explains, is to move beyond what she calls "rescue-style preservation", intervening only after deterioration becomes visible.

In one pilot study in Huangshan, East China's Anhui province, her team analyzed hundreds of villages simultaneously, tracing not only architectural conditions but also changes in settlement vitality, population activity and landscape continuity.

"Protection cannot remain reactive, and we need to understand change before it becomes loss," she says.

Contact the writer at yangfeiyue@chinadaily.com.cn