Photo/Shetuwang

May 7 (NBD) -- Singer, actor, photographer, foodie, and advocate of intangible culture heritage...Such creative positions that used to be exclusively accessible to urban young people are now a way for small-town youngsters to make a living or earn pocket money.

Small-town youngsters refer to people who age 18-35 and live in third-tier and small cities, towns, villages, or urban-rural fringe areas.

According to a report jointly released by short video-sharing platform Kuaishou and China Youth Daily, small-town youngsters are fired with an enthusiasm for teaching videos such as skill learning, food production and science. The number of small-town youngsters watching such videos is eight times the size of urban young people.

Their strong desire to change destiny, plus more free time, enables them to start their own businesses based on their interests like sports, travel, music, singing, cake-making and bee-keeping, which thereby strongly drives the development of leisure economy, as shown in the report. Rather than catching up with the trends, they in many cases are leading trends.  

"Finishing my bachelor's degree in Kent, the UK, I returned in 2016 to Guangyuan, a prefecture-level city in southwest China's Sichuan province," shared Yin with National Business Daily. After 6 years of study in architecture, Yin is currently working at a state-owned institute of design and construction. 

When asked why she chose the small city over big ones, Yin remarked, "I enjoy my comfortable lifestyle here which I may never be able to afford in Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzen."

Photo/Shetuwang

The report also reveals 30 percent of small-town youngsters are financially independent and own cars and apartments. 

In 2016-2020, around 50 million households will enter the middle and upper classes, with half of them likely to be located outside China's top 100 cities, according to a report by The Boston Consulting Group and AliResearch, a unit of the e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Moreover, the report by Kuaishou and China Youth Daily indicates small-town young people often get married earlier than peers in metropolises, usually at the age of 26, and nearly half of women living in small towns give birth to their first kids before they turn 25. 

Yin stepped into marriage the year she returned to her hometown, and becomes a mom to an adorable boy last year.

China is not the only country which saw small-town young people become major driving forces of consumption.

According to Time magazine, astonishingly high housing costs drive younger people in the U.S. to leave big cities for small towns. They find it more attractive and less stressful to live in Columbus, Ohio, or Greenville, South Carolina, Sioux Falls, or South Dakota than in Los Angeles or New York.

"In many smaller towns, much lower costs for apartments, homes, office space, or art studios make more possibilities open", said the article.

However, the situation in some European countries is vastly different. Rural villages are dying out as villagers there fled their hometown to find jobs in the city.

News outlet The Politico calculated in 2015 that in Italy, there were 6,000 ghost towns nationwide, as well as 15,000 villages whose original population has shrunk by 10 percent. In Spain, Daily Mail estimated that there were 2,900 abandoned villages.

Due to lagging technology and Internet development, small towns in these European countries cannot hold much allure for the young. In order to rejuvenate small towns, it is essential to further the development of the Internet, according to the report, as none of business can survive today without information. 

Email: lansuying@nbd.com.cn