From ditch digging to herding donkeys, no rest for China’s rural seniors

Ren Dezhi peers into his woodpile, looking for the Siberian weasel that a neighbor just spotted slinking toward his henhouse. 

Finding no trace of it, he gathers corn to feed his drove of donkeys – working stock for his small, 2-acre farm – and prepares to herd them into the rugged hills of northern Shaanxi province.

Mr. Ren’s tanned face bears the telltale wrinkles of a life spent farming on the harsh, windswept loess plateau. If he’d grown up in one of China’s big cities, he would be retired by now, enjoying a worker’s pension. Instead, he must eke out a living, raising crops of potatoes, beans, and corn on his scattered, terraced fields.

“Aiyah, this land can’t sustain us reliably,” Mr. Ren, in his late 60s, says with a sigh one recent morning. “If the weather is good, we can get a harvest. If there’s drought, we have nothing. We depend on heaven to eat.”