Paper short abstract:

In contemporary China, where a compelling discourse casts depopulating rural regions as devoid of life as well as meaning, emptiness resides not only in deserted homes, but also in people's minds.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 1990s, when the urban bias took root in government policies as well as people's minds, life in China's countryside has been denigrated in the popular imagination as empty of meaning. Whereas the city, housing the nation's growing middle class, is viewed as a place of affluence and progress, the country has come to figure as the city's binary other: a hotbed of poverty and a metonym for backwardness. The perceived dearth of opportunities for crafting meaningful lives in rural China fuelled more than three decades of migration to the cities. Probing the impact of a discourse that renders depopulating rural regions as 'voids' - empty not only of people but also of significance - on the lives of their residents, this paper shows that emptiness manifests not only in deserted homes, overgrown paddy fields, severed social bonds, and eerie silence, but also in people's minds. Emptiness is as much around as in those who either choose to remain or are forced to do so due to deprivation. Emptiness haunts them. It troubles and torments residents who wittingly or unwittingly adopt discriminating narratives and sustain them through acts of self-condemnation. Drawing on research in an emptying village in south-western Guizhou in 2015/16, this paper sheds light on the discursive work that goes into the production of emptiness as a mode of experience. Top-down and bottom-up classificatory processes work together with a changing environment to influence the ways in which people perceive and cope with emptiness.