Growing numbers of Chinese are escaping urban life for rural peace

IN January 2020 Alec Ash, an English writer living in Beijing, arrived in the small mountain town of Dali in south-western China. He and his fiancée had split up just two months before their wedding, and he wanted to escape. So he chose a mountain refuge to which a growing number of Chinese were fleeing, seeking a different kind of Chinese dream. The ancient town became known as “Dalifornia”. Some of the new arrivals were writers and political dissidents, but many were refugees from modernity. The reason most of them left cities, writes Mr Ash, “is not communist control so much as capitalist excess”. has improved people’s lives. But now some citizens are stepping back from the “gospel of development” and asking, “What was it all for? I’m richer, but am I happy?”