Historically China’s rapid industrialisation and higher land prices pressured farmers to grow as much as possible in each plot, argues Chang Tianle, who runs Beijing Farmers’ Market. She says that this prioritised quantity over quality. Though still mostly for the middle class, organic produce has become cheaper as more farmers have started growing it. Alibaba’s Freshippo supermarket recently told Chinese media that it has brought the price of organic vegetables down from two to three times the price of ordinary vegetables to around one and a half times the price. Other leading e- commerce platforms have built organic supply chains and farms from Shandong to Shanxi now offer organic veggie boxes. Big challenges remain. Doubters wonder whether items are truly organic in China, given past soil and water pollution. Though her sales slowly rise each year, Ms Chang also worries that young people work too much to cook or care about quality ingredients and that the higher prices small farms need to charge will put buyers off their fare. (Some 40% of China’s 1.4bn people order food delivery.) Others see an opportunity in making fresh and healthy meals convenient and cheap. After studying the fast-casual American chains Chipotle and Sweetgreen in graduate school, Gao Song founded Foodbowl in 2015 and tweaked his offerings to suit Chinese preferences (suspicions abound over raw salads). Business boomed after the pandemic, which he credits with making Chinese think more about their health. The Californian shift may be welcomed by the government. Chinese people still have “very sensitive nerves” when it comes to food safety, says Han Guanghua of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. And his research suggests the public tends to blame such problems on the central government rather than local officials, so avoiding food-safety scandals is a priority. It also helps in the battle of the bulge. Last year, the government called rising obesity “a major public-health threat”. The Communist Party wants people to go from chidebao, eating enough, to chidehao, eating well. It could all prove to be a most delectable change. ■
Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//china/2026/06/14/the-californication-of-middle-class- chinese-diets
How China still outworks the West A medal scheme masks the identity of its toughest labourers June 18th 2026 “I AM SIMPLY a jade maker,” Yang Fuyu told the local press after he won a national labour medal this year for his skill and dedication. One look at his intricate carving contradicts him: there is nothing simple about it. He and his colleagues spent five months on a recent piece, transforming the stone’s bumps and irregularities into mythological dragons, ethereal yet fierce. Titled “Nine dragons offering a jade disc”, the creatures look like they wouldn’t give it up without a fight. The labour medals, which are awarded each year by the official federation of trade unions, are meant to celebrate and motivate beleaguered Chinese workers. Some of the winners richly deserve the recognition. But the mix of awards does not accurately reflect the job market of today. Instead it mirrors
a government mindset that may actually be contributing to China’s employment problems. China’s workers could do with a morale boost. In recent years millions of construction workers have lost their jobs amid a persistent property slump. White-collar workers fear the ethereal, yet fierce, threat posed by artificial intelligence. And although high-tech manufacturing is booming, it is better at scaring German workers than employing Chinese ones. The medals’ honour roll is nonetheless littered with engineers, technicians and Communist Party secretaries. Services and the gig economy, which provide a growing share of jobs, are underrepresented. China’s railway industry (which employs 1.8m) picked 18 individual winners; financial services (which employs over 12.3m) chose 16. Only a handful of delivery riders made the cut, conspicuous in yellow-and-black biker outfits at the awards ceremony in Beijing. The medals also fail to reflect the geography of Chinese labour. Each provincial branch of the trade-union federation is given a quota of awards to hand out, but they are only loosely linked to the size of the province’s workforce. Guangdong, where Mr Yang works, now accounts for almost 10% of Chinese employment but handed out less than 6% of the medals reserved for China’s provinces. Meanwhile Beijing, Shanghai and China’s old industrial heartland in the north-east are overrepresented among the medallists, claiming over a fifth of the quota but providing less than a tenth of employment between them.
Nor does the mix of medals reflect how hard people work in each part of the country. Workers in Beijing and Shanghai typically put in fewer hours than their comrades elsewhere, according to China’s time-use survey, which quizzes people about how they divide up their day (see chart). Neither city would relish this distinction, of course. But it is not wholly surprising. As the richest parts of China, they can afford more leisure than poorer regions. The same link between hours and income is visible across the country: workers’ hours tend to be shorter in richer provinces. One notable exception is Zhejiang, a province which includes both the entrepreneurial city of Wenzhou and the tech capital of Hangzhou. Its workers’ hours of toil are surprisingly long, given the province’s prosperity. In announcing the awards, the trade-union federation called on all workers to follow the example of the medallists, showing dedication to their posts and making greater contributions to national goals. China’s leaders often praise hard work and worry that generous welfare schemes will breed the laziness they associate with some Western countries. But the pattern visible across China’s provinces is also discernible over time: as China gets richer, its workers’ hours have shortened. Looking at the the previous survey in 2018, workers averaged seven hours and eight minutes of
paid labour per day, either in employment or family business. In the latest survey, they averaged six hours and 23 minutes. This more recent figure is, in fact, no higher than workers report in America and Germany. The biggest difference between China and the decadent West revealed in these surveys is how many of its people work, not how long they work. In China, over 75% of 18- to 59-year-olds take part in some form of paid labour. In America (which classifies age groups differently) the equivalent percentage for 18- to 54-year-olds is 56%. One interpretation is that people who would be out of the workforce altogether in countries with better social- safety nets still chalk up some hours in China. Their contribution may drag down the national average. And they won’t win any medals. But they are the reason China still outworks the West. ■ Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//china/2026/06/18/how-china-still-outworks-the-west
News extortion is rife in China The country’s censors may be making it worse June 18th 2026 Last month China’s authorities revealed that three men in Zhejiang, an eastern province, had been sentenced for a curious crime known as “news extortion”. They had dug up (or in many cases made up) dirt on over 180 companies that were preparing to go public and then demanded hush money to not publish it on social media. What was most concerning, said prosecutors, was that some companies did not report the extortion to the police, even though the information that the men threatened to publish was not true. Instead they just paid up to avoid disruptions to the listing process. One firm sent 50,000 yuan ($7,000) to make the problem go away; another, 30,000 yuan.
Companies in many places might hope that paying money could spike a negative news report or perhaps generate a positive one. But in China the practice is rife, and is not just limited to online scammers. In a notorious case in 2002 four journalists at Xinhua, the powerful state broadcaster, took cash and gold from a mining company in return for hushing up a deadly explosion. In 2015 an executive at the 21st Century Business Herald, a state- owned broadsheet, was sentenced to four years in prison for extortion. Last year an influential financial blogger was found to have made 700,000 yuan from the companies he wrote about. In one case, he falsely claimed a Shanghai firm’s employee had been stabbed by an unhappy customer, and only removed the article after receiving a hefty fee for “information services”. The government blames bad apples for the problem. But it is often China’s own strict controls over its media that lead to corrupt behaviour, writes David Bandurski of China Media Project, a research group, in a recent blog post. The job of state-media journalists is often to create “positive energy” with their stories so as to flatter the government. That encourages unethical practices. And making unwelcome news reports vanish attracts little scrutiny in China because, thanks to an army of censors, stories disappear all the time without explanation. Another problem is that it is especially tough in China for media companies to survive just by selling news. Few have persuaded readers to pay for subscriptions. That is because “the media here aren’t allowed to write about real things,” laments one dispirited former journalist. She spent a year at an online outlet that wrote negative stories about companies until they signed advertising contracts. Extortion, she says, is simply “the most direct and effective method to make money through reporting”.■ Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//china/2026/06/18/news-extortion-is-rife-in-china
Comfort meets constraint in China’s most “liveable” city A high-income, low-pressure existence is not all it’s cracked up to be June 18th 2026 What does the good life look like in China? A loaded question, no doubt. For some it will elicit praise of safety, convenience and planning-minded leaders. Others will say that combination also entails repression, surveillance and a sluggish economy. The complex reality is that these problems and virtues are all there, often alongside each other. To bring a bit of depth to the matter, Chaguan decided to look at it from the vantage of “liveability”, by spending time in Shaoxing, a city judged as the country’s best in a popular newspaper index. That is not a soft test of China but a stiff one: if boosters’ claims hold anywhere, they should hold here.