Spending thousands of yuan, some parents in China are enrolling their children in programmes that involve physical farm work — carrying bricks, tending crops, and cleaning out livestock stalls.
That summer, videos circulating across Chinese social media showed children at rural farm programmes — some sent from cities like Shanghai to provinces such as Guizhou — carrying out physical tasks including gathering firewood, moving bricks, and clearing weeds, while others were heard in separate clips expressing exhaustion and distress, with one telling the camera that the plane fare spent on the trip had only landed him in labour, and another, in tears, telling his mother he had been wrong. One participant expressed a wish to return home and continue schoolwork — a sentiment heard inside what are known in Chinese as chi ku, or "eat bitterness", facilities designed around physical and psychological hardship.
Drawn from the six-to-16 age bracket, participants attend programmes concentrated across three southwestern provinces — Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou — with organisers framing enrolment around a perceived gap in resilience among younger generations, a view that has found some traction among parents. Programmes of this kind have been running since the early 2000s, yet participation levels climbed notably over the summer months. Enrolment enquiries from parents picked up after footage circulated showing campers visibly upset.
Enrolment in these programmes is capped, and the fees reflect their status as privately run, commercially operated ventures rather than school-affiliated courses — with ten-day packages priced at around 5,000 yuan (US$700) and month-long options climbing above 10,000 yuan. Documented activities among the programme's younger attendees have included gathering tea leaves, preparing meals on clay stoves, working soil in the summer heat, transporting bricks, cleaning out cattle sheds, and carrying rice-laden bags along mountain trails.
Haoshi Study Tours — a business founded and led by Tong Lu, herself the parent of an eight-year-old — organises a six-day outdoor programme set among the mountain terrain of Lishui, in Zhejiang province. Scheduled during July across one of the province's hotter inland areas, the camps regularly face afternoon readings that push past 35 degrees Celsius. Known as "Swapped Lives," the initiative places children between nine and 12 years old with farming households in nearby villages, where they take part in daily agricultural routines alongside the resident families.
In remarks to a major news organisation, Tong expressed the personal view that children in China have been raised amid relative prosperity and limited hardship, a combination she believes leaves many without the resilience to push through difficulties or maintain sustained effort — a tendency she characterised as producing young people who have not experienced genuine want in terms of food or basic necessities. Camp activities are designed so that children develop a hands-on understanding of the labour behind things many of them have never needed to consider — resources like tutoring programmes and household transport that some families treat as routine.
The settlement's younger residents spread out across the surrounding area each morning, woven baskets balanced on their backs, to gather fallen branches and timber scraps, returning with enough fuel to keep the clay stove burning. Gathering fuel alone — tracking it down, bundling it into manageable loads, and carrying it home — can consume the better part of three to four hours, all in service of a meal that takes no more than ten minutes to eat.
Harvested over sessions lasting as long as half an hour, the leaves can be traded in for donated provisions — principally food staples like milk and eight-treasure congee — intended for households in financial need. The permitted window for transporting cow dung runs between ten and twenty minutes.
According to Zhang Hao, who designed the camp's programme, the activity introduces children to the kind of hands-on labour that defines farm life — while the collected manure either goes through composting to produce fertiliser or enters biogas digesters where it is converted into fuel. Zhang noted that the underlying goal is helping children understand where their food originates, how it gets cultivated, and the labour involved in bringing it to the table.
Upon reaching the village lodgings, a number of children find themselves assigned to rooms housing five to seven people, with wooden bunk beds serving as the sleeping arrangement. Liu Baoshun, who has guided four camps for the company across three years as a study tour instructor, noted that children typically express a desire to return home at some point during the experience. Homesickness tends to surface for a number of children during the opening nights away, with phone calls back to family sometimes accompanied by tears. Those who ask to leave are told to hold on a little longer, and when daylight filters through, most choose to continue.
Pupils from the settlement trek five kilometres through hilly terrain on the designated day, each one hauling a kilogram of rice — the same load their fellow students from the area routinely transport. At the end of a walk spanning around ninety minutes, an abandoned village schoolhouse — one that educated children from the surrounding area — stands at the journey's end. When fatigue sets in partway through a task, young people are permitted to pause, reduce their load, or break the work into multiple trips, yet completing it remains a requirement. The group passes around metal containers holding plain rice for their meal beside a locked classroom door.
One participant Liu brought up had friction with staff members at the start of the programme, yet underwent a noticeable shift in attitude as the weeks went on. During the group walk, the child asked to take on more weight — telling the teacher he wanted to carry additional rice — while parents, ahead of the programme's formal opening, are invited to compose private letters addressed to their children. Toward the close of the programme, after days of work, Zhang observed that written letters were distributed among the children — a number of whom wept upon reading the words inside, with some going straight home to tell their mothers of their love and gratitude, a response he described as the thing parents value most.
Tong defended the programme's demanding structure, contending that a lower level of intensity would leave participants without the hands-on experience the camp was built to deliver. Those running the programme are candid about its boundaries: Zhang noted that the setup is nothing like a military camp, and that a stay of five or six days cannot be expected to reshape a child entirely, while Liu added that any gains from attendance are unlikely to hold over time.
Specialists in psychology have noted that applying excessive pressure on individuals in this context tends to produce results contrary to those intended. Researchers noted that prolonged or acute hardship, paired with limited support structures, may tax a child's capacity to manage distress rather than build it up, with Setoh Peipei, who leads the psychology department at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, pointing out that the ability to withstand the greatest degree of adversity does not, on its own, define a resilient child. Building the capacity to navigate manageable obstacles — paired with adequate support structures — is what allows psychological durability to take root, she noted, rather than exposure to hardship alone.
Setoh went on to note that some degree of friction plays a role in children's development. Toppling off a bicycle and climbing back on — adjusting posture, rethinking balance — forms part of how children actually develop the coordination to ride one. Her position draws a distinction between hardships that develop practical capabilities and those designed purely to harm or demean a child.
A young person who internalises the message that voicing distress or seeking support will only lead to demands for greater endurance may develop a pattern of simply bearing hardship rather than building the tools to navigate it, Setoh noted, adding that visible suffering in younger children cannot be taken on its own as proof that an intervention is producing the intended effect. Prolonged exposure to demanding conditions at such programmes can leave traces that persist well beyond the experience itself, she noted. When a child undergoes intense fear or helplessness at camp, believes that adults will not acknowledge their distress, or interprets the placement itself as a form of punishment, those experiences can take root and manifest later as anxiety, a reluctance to take risks, or an inability to rely on others.
Setoh pointed out that when children are taken to a structured, rule-governed programme under the guise of a countryside trip, they may walk away with something quite different from what parents had in mind — not a sense of thankfulness toward them, but a lingering question about whether their word can be trusted — and that how old the child is shapes the way this dynamic tends to unfold. Research indicates that adolescents around age 15 tend to grasp the temporary nature and purpose of a hardship programme more readily than younger attendees, who generally rely on the presence of familiar, trustworthy adults as a foundation for feeling secure.
Some children, in fact, find the experience worthwhile. Speaking with local reporters, a Chengdu father who signed his daughter up for the programme — over her protests at the time — described how the agricultural work initially drew complaints from her, yet gradually pulled her in, until she had, by his telling, come to genuinely enjoy it.
Desiree Qin Baolian, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Michigan State University, noted that the same hardship can push one child toward resilience while leaving another with lasting harm, adding that placing children in demanding situations is only constructive when the surrounding environment remains warm and supportive. The more meaningful question for parents, she said, is whether a child's newfound compliance after camp reflects genuine development or a response rooted in fear, since short-term obedience and long-term wellbeing are fundamentally distinct outcomes, and compliance driven by fear tends to fade while also embedding patterns of anxiety and distrust. Researchers note that, without reliable support from the adults around them, affected children may gradually lose confidence in their ability to seek help from others.
Part of Qin's approach redirects attention toward the parents of children rather than keeping it fixed on the children themselves. Qin observed that although raising resilient children ranks among the most common aspirations parents hold, a number of those same parents find their personal anxieties difficult to contain — and those unaddressed feelings can find their way into how children experience the world around them. Among the guidance Qin offered, placing priority on managing one's own anxiety before seeking to tightly direct a child's every experience stands out as a key recommendation for parents. Allowing children to navigate setbacks, stumble through errors, and find their own footing is itself a building block of resilience, she noted, adding that genuine freedom to explore and to fail without consequence is what enables young people to learn and develop in lasting ways.
