For 12,000 Yuan, a Life: Why Young Chinese Are Buying Houses on the Edge of the Taiga
A woman who worked fifteen years in Beijing has settled in a forestry town on the Greater Khingan Range after buying a home for the price of a smartphone. Her story is trending nationwide as a template for opting out — and as an index of how far China's small industrial towns have fallen.
A house for 12,000 yuan — about the price of a mid-range smartphone — is not normally an advertisement for anywhere. In Yitulihe, a former forestry town in the Greater Khingan Range of Inner Mongolia, it is the reason a former Beijing office worker named Xiao Kui is trending nationwide.
Her story, told in a profile by the magazine Renwu and circulating this week under the hashtag "young people fleeing Beijing and Shanghai for the Khingan Mountains," runs: fifteen years of work in the capital, a resignation in 2024 out of exhaustion, then a return to her native northeast. In early 2025 she bought a 50-square-metre flat for 12,000 yuan, and a 90-square-metre courtyard house with 1,000 square metres of land attached for 35,000 more. She rents out her Beijing apartment and lives on the rent. Vegetables come from her garden, mushrooms and berries from the hills, transport from a three-wheeled cart; sunbathing and sledding are, as her account puts it, free. Asked whether she regretted it, she said there was not a single moment of regret.
The arithmetic is the story's hook, and its verdict on two decades of Chinese urbanisation. Yitulihe was once the most important rail junction of the Khingan forestry region — a town built by the loggers who stripped the boreal forest for the state. In 2015, China imposed a complete commercial logging ban on natural forest, and the town's industry, and much of its population, drained away. What is left is a settlement built for tens of thousands, still wired with schools, hospitals and district heating, now housing a fraction of that — which is precisely why a deed costs what a city lunch delivery app spends in a year.
The commentary around the story splits into two camps. One reads Xiao Kui as aspiration: the only arbitrage left to a Chinese millennial without family money is to trade a megacity's wages, which were consuming her, for a dying town's real estate, which costs nothing and grants time. The other reaches for the missing details — winter temperatures past minus thirty, a serious hospital hours away, and no work for a former urban professional in a town of a few thousand. "隐居" — living in seclusion — is the hashtag's verb, borrowed from a long literary tradition of scholars withdrawing to the mountains; skeptics note that the classical hermits had estates and patrons, while Xiao Kui has a Beijing tenant and a savings account.
What neither side disputes is the symptom. The Khingan towns are among dozens of forestry, mining and railway settlements the state has managed through quiet decline since their industries closed, and the young people who left by the million are now, in a handful of visible cases, trickling back — not for work, which does not exist, but for housing that costs less than a deposit on a city lease. That the return ticket has become this cheap says something bleak about those towns. That anyone wants to punch it says something no less telling about the megacities they left.