In his article “Bitter Sweetness: Compelling Greenhouse Farming and the Inter-Mobility among Middle-Aged Farmers in North China,” Yue Liao explores the lives of middle-aged greenhouse farmers in rural North China whose aspirations for mobility unfold through staying rather than leaving. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in North China and the Yangtze River Delta, he examines how greenhouse farming enables farmers to navigate the tensions between market opportunities, kinship obligations, and rural life. From these ethnographic encounters, Liao develops the concept of inter-mobility to show that mobility is not only a matter of physical movement but can also be forged through the ways people negotiate work, care, and aspiration while remaining in place. In this author interview, Liao reflects on the origins of his fieldwork, the development of his key analytical concepts, and the writing and revision process behind the article. He also discusses how he teaches China through ethnography, encouraging students to see theory as emerging from everyday life while offering broader reflections on researching, writing, and teaching contemporary China across different academic contexts.

1. Origins of the research interest

Fei Yuan (FY): Your article opens with a striking scene: Xu Guoxiang, praised by officials as a model greenhouse farmer, dismisses himself as a “nobody” and urges you to interview the younger, more successful vegetable entrepreneurs in the South instead. I would like to begin with your own journey into this project. How did you first come to Lanling and to the question of greenhouse farming? Was there a moment in the field, such as an encounter like this one, that made you realize that the middle-aged “stayers” were the story you wanted to tell?

Yue Liao (YL): My being in Lanling was purely accidental. In 2018, I received a research opportunity from a Shanghai-based English-language magazine called Sixth Tone to investigate agricultural transformation in China, and Lanling happened to be the final stop of our tour. During that visit, I met Secretary Xu, a village party secretary who had returned from Shanghai to promote greenhouse farming through a local cooperative. Talking with him, two things immediately caught my attention. First, there was a deep connection between Lanling’s greenhouse production and the vegetable markets in Shanghai and other southern cities, many of which were dominated by Lanling natives. Second, almost all the greenhouse farmers in his cooperative were in their forties or fifties. He casually explained that the young had all gone south to do business, while the elderly could no longer handle the physical labor.

The following year, I returned to Lanling for a monthlong stay, which gave me much more time to talk with these middle-aged greenhouse farmers. Through extended conversations and daily interactions, I began to see that these farmers were caught in between. They were not young enough to leave for the cities, nor were they willing to return to traditional subsistence farming. This observation made me realize that these “stayers” were not simply trapped or passive. They were actively carving out a different kind of livelihood in the space between their rural roots and the urban markets. That became the starting point of my research.

2. Object of study and positionality

FY: Your fieldwork spanned both Lanling and the Yangtze River Delta from 2018 to 2022, following vegetable producers and traders across the very rural–urban circuits that structure your interlocutors’ self-understandings. How did moving between these sites shape your research? And how did your own position inflect your conversations and your sense of responsibility toward your interlocutors who repeatedly described themselves as having “no other abilities except farming”?

LY: Moving between Lanling and the Yangtze River Delta was essential because my interlocutors’ lives were already structured by that circuit. To understand why they saw themselves as inferior to those who had gone south yet superior to the older peasant generation, I had to follow the same pathways that shaped their aspirations and anxieties. Seeing both ends of the vegetable supply chain made visible the social-spatial hierarchy they constantly measured themselves against.

My own position was shaped by my rural background. I grew up in a rural family in southern China, and my grandparents sold vegetables for a living. That gave me a certain familiarity with their lives and a deep respect for their labor. But I also occupied a very different position. As a young, urban-educated doctoral student abroad at the time, I embodied the kind of mobility they aspired to for their children but could not fully achieve themselves. This was an uncomfortable but productive tension. When farmers told me they had “no other abilities except farming,” I took it seriously. I heard both genuine humility and a subtle recognition of the distance between us. My responsibility was not to romanticize their struggle or to pity them, but to show how, within constraints, they exercised agency through care, skill, and the ethical commitment of yongxin.

3. The concept of inter-mobility

FY: The article’s central contribution is the concept of inter-mobility, which you carefully distinguish from Massey’s “differentiated mobility,” Carling’s “involuntary immobility,” and the “secondary mobility” of refugee studies. Could you reflect on how this concept took shape? I am especially curious about the threefold work you assign to the prefix “inter-” (interstitial, intergenerational, intertwined), and whether you see the concept traveling beyond rural China.

YL: The concept of inter-mobility emerged from a persistent puzzle in the field. Middle-aged farmers often expressed deep ambivalence: They valued greenhouse income but lamented being bounded by these greenhouses. I was struck by this contradiction: Why not leave if they were so unhappy, and if truly trapped, how could they display such agency?

I initially tried theorizing this as “secondary mobility,” but reviewer feedback pushed me to rethink. They pointed out that this term belongs to refugee studies and implies sequential physical relocations, which did not fit my interlocutors. One reviewer pressed me on the logical disconnect between describing them as involuntarily immobile while also calling them secondarily mobile.

That critique forced me to reexamine my materials. These farmers were neither secondary migrants nor passive captives. They had not moved geographically, but their lives were reactivated—connected to national markets through greenhouses, transforming high-risk farming into intergenerational care through the ethical commitment of yongxin, and receiving job invitations from across the country without ever leaving the village. The prefix “inter-” emerged from what I observed: They occupy an interstitial space between older peasants and urban elites; they mediate intergenerational tensions between caring for aging parents and investing in children’s futures; and their economic risk-taking is intertwined with family obligations. “Inter-mobility” captures gaining partial control over mobility without physical relocation—their real predicament is not whether they can leave, but how to regain agency while staying in place.

Does the concept travel beyond rural China? I believe so. Anywhere people navigate constrained agency within stratified mobility regimes—whether stayers in migrant communities or those opting out of dominant mobility ideals—inter-mobility offers a lens for understanding how people create meaningful lives within structural constraints. It’s about the art of dwelling strategically within unequal systems.

4. Emic vernacular concepts 

FY: Some of the most powerful analytical moves in the article rest on your interlocutors’ own terms: yongxin as the “moral engine” of inter-mobility, chumen, shangjinxin, dai, tu zhuanjia. Xu Guoxiang’s analogy between raising cucumbers and raising children does as much theoretical work as any citation. What is gained—and what risks distortion—when vernacular emic concepts carry analytical weight in English-language anthropology?

YL: Using vernacular concepts is valuable because they capture meanings that translations cannot fully convey. Xu Guoxiang’s analogy between raising cucumbers and raising children, for instance, does theoretical work that no academic term could replicate. It reveals how farming, care, and moral obligation are fused in practice.

The gain is precision and resonance. These terms preserve the texture of my interlocutors’ world and show that theory is already embedded in their language. They also challenge the assumption that analytical concepts must come from Western academic traditions. The risk, I think, is distortion. When emic terms travel into English-language anthropology, they can be flattened or exoticized. They may be reduced to illustrations rather than treated as genuine theoretical tools. There is also the risk of overburdening a single term, making it carry more analytical weight than it should.

My approach was to keep them anchored in ethnographic context. I defined them clearly, showed how they operate in practice, and avoided treating them as self-explanatory. The goal is not to make these terms exotic, but to show that they offer a different way of theorizing from the ground up.

5. Advice for early-career scholars

FY: The article moves gracefully between interlocutors’ life experiences—like Lao Zhang’s pride in having “seen the elephant,” the midnight cucumber harvests, the tricycle advertisement for treating back pain—and structural analysis of hukou, agrarian capitalization, and climate risk. Could you share something of your writing and revision process, including how the piece changed through peer review? What advice would you offer early-career scholars, particularly scholars researching and writing about China from both within Chinese institutions and those overseas?

YL: The writing process was shaped by a commitment to let ethnographic detail and structural analysis speak to each other. I wanted readers to feel the weight of midnight harvests and the ache in farmers’ backs, but also to see how those experiences were produced by hukou, market volatility, and climate risk.

The manuscript went through three major rounds of revision, and each round brought new challenges. Reviewers pushed me to clarify what was distinctive about my interlocutors’ situation, to expand the discussion of kinship and household strategies, and to strengthen comparative engagement with other forms of aspirational mobility. Each round of revision pushed me to think more carefully about what my material actually showed, rather than what I assumed it showed. The final version is much stronger because of the rigorous feedback I received.

For early-career scholars, I hesitate to offer advice since I’m still early in my own career. If anything, I would say: Approach every piece of work with yongxin. After you finish a draft, take the time to polish it thoroughly. Aim high, even for top journals. The process of revision is where the real thinking happens.

6. Teaching 

FY: Do you incorporate your own research into your classrooms? How do Chinese students, particularly those from urban areas, respond to an ethnography of rural Shandong? What do you think anthropological classes could offer to students from diverse backgrounds?

YL: Yes, I assign this article alongside Julie Chu’s Cosmologies of Credit in my Economic Anthropology course for a comparative seminar discussion. Many find the ethnographic material ordinary or even commonsensical. What impresses them is the theoretical work—how mundane observations can be transformed into a rigorous concept like inter-mobility. This response becomes a valuable teaching moment. I use it to show that anthropological theory does not require exotic subjects or distant worlds. The theoretical move lies in how you frame the ordinary. Theory is not something imposed from above, but something that emerges from close attention to what people actually say and do. That lesson, I think, stays with students long after they’ve forgotten the ethnographic details.

What anthropological classes offer to students from diverse backgrounds, I think, is the practice of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It teaches a way of thinking: to hold complexity, to sit with contradiction, to take people’s own understandings seriously while also locating them within larger structures. That’s a skill that matters regardless of where you come from or what you go on to do.

7. How U.S.-based scholars might teach about China research

FY: This article is rich in ethnography and is likely to be read and taught in China studies classrooms in the United States, where China research often reflects geopolitical worries or state-centered narratives. The farmers in your story are neither victims nor heroes of market reform; instead, they are people experiencing the complexities of “bitter sweetness” within layers of social mobility. How would you like U.S.-based scholars to teach this article and China research in general?

YL: I would hope that U.S.-based scholars teach this article not as a case study that confirms or challenges grand narratives about China—whether triumphalist or critical—but as an ethnographic account of people navigating real, complex lives within structural constraints. The farmers in this story are neither victims nor heroes. They are people making strategic calculations, experiencing pride and exhaustion, investing in their children’s futures while confronting aging bodies and volatile markets. That complexity is precisely what ethnography is equipped to capture.

In teaching China research more broadly, I would encourage scholars to move beyond state-centered frameworks or geopolitical anxieties as the default lens. China is not reducible to its government or its economic statistics. It is also the daily lives of people like Xu Guoxiang, who raise cucumbers and children with equal care, who measure themselves against those who left and those who stayed, who find meaning in being “self-taught experts” even as they sigh about being “bounded.”