LIZU village in Zhejiang Province greets visitors with white-walled houses, flagstone lanes, the scent of coffee and a busy weekend when finding a parking lot is not easy.
Once a poor, remote village and a subdistrict of the city of Yiwu, the village now hosts 80 agricultural innovation projects and 282 “new farmers,” generating 70 million yuan ($10.3 million) in annual sales and welcoming more than one million tourists every year.
The village’s rise reflects Yiwu’s urban-rural integration strategy. In this global small-commodity hub, city and countryside form a two-way empowerment network: urban spillover.
Talent returning to villages
Jin Ying, a Yiwu native who left her city job, opened a café in Lizu in 2025. Keeping the original decor of the rented shop, she invested in quality coffee beans instead. Today, she sells an average of 40 cups a day, reaching 200 cups during holidays.
“The more coffee shops a village has, the more young people it attracts,” said Jin. There are now nine or ten coffee shops in the village, each with its own character.
Her café focuses on bean quality — she selects and roasts beans herself from raw bean factories in Uganda. Her customers include locals, other creators in the village and tourists who come after seeing her shop on a Chinese app for sharing daily life Xiaohongshu or China’s major short-video platform Douyin.
Asked why she chose the village, Jin said that she first learned about the village in 2019 and has watched it develop ever since. “The village has a dedicated operations team, which is very attractive to creators.” she said.
“This is different from other villages, and the activities are not dictated by village officials but adjusted based on creators’ feedback,” she added.
In recent years, the village has adopted a professional manager model, partnering with an operations company to handle planning, branding and incubation. The company has transformed more than 140 idle houses and 400 mu (2.66 hectares) of farmland into 80 agricultural innovation projects, created public IPs and developed over 40 products.
Nan Fang, a teacher at the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Technicians, quit her job in Ningbo to co-found “Rushi Ting,” a Song brocade handicraft workshop in the village, bringing her students along.
“The courtyard feels like home. Though Song brocade originated in Suzhou, Yiwu is the starting point of the New Silk Road — I hope this craft can continue here,” she said.
Since September 2023, the number of “new farmers” in the village has risen from 220 to 282. These city-to-countryside migrants have set up studios by paddy fields and in old houses reflecting a reverse flow of talent toward rural areas. The return of talent has turned the village from a left-behind place into a new entrepreneurial frontier.
Striding into new boundaries
The reason entrepreneurs come and stay lies in the village’s “urban-level” infrastructure, which is possible precisely because Yiwu’s urban functions naturally extend into the countryside.
Fang Zhijian, deputy secretary of the Lizu Party branch, remembered the village as a child as exactly what a “traditional rural village should look like” — dirt roads, old houses, isolated, with no direct bus route. To catch a bus to town, one had to walk through the neighboring village.
GLOBAL TIMES