‘I find hope in sticking together and keeping each other warm’ – This is climate breakdown

• Location Guangdong, China

• Disaster Extreme rainfall, 2024

Li Jie lives in Xianniangxi, a mountainous village in southern China’s Guangdong province with her family, where she is a social worker for a rural non-profit organisation and also works in the fields. The climate crisis has increased heavy rainfall in Guangdong and exacerbated floods in the province in April 2024, which have since killed at least 47 people.

I was born in a rural area in Shanxi and then went to university in the city of Guangzhou. After studying and working in Guangzhou, I found the fast-paced life in the big city too stressful. I wanted to find a place with a good environment, where I didn’t have to commute for a long time, and where I could see familiar faces when I went out. So I came back.

A view of a waterlogged village and fields after torrential rain on 21 April in Qingyuan, Guangdong. China’s state flood control has sped up its rescue response in the province. Photograph: Qiu Xinsheng/VCG/Getty Images

Our village is located in the upper reaches of the Liuxi River, surrounded by mountains and forests. The people here are self-sufficient, taking life at a gentle pace. You’ll often see the elderly sitting under the trees, chatting and gossiping, and the grandmas are all dressed in lovely purple floral shirts.

I met my husband here, we both live in the village. I’ve been working with farmers to grow Japanese plum, ginger and sweet potatoes, and growing my own crops. Our farmlands are pretty scattered, with some belonging to our neighbours. The largest patch is about three miles long, which goes up along the mountain like terraced fields.

Flooded farmland showing the aftermath of heavy rainfall in Meizhou in Guangdong province. Rainstorms also caused landslides in some areas as well as waterlogging. Photograph: John Ricky/Anadolu/Getty Images

Over the past few years, I’ve become very aware of how the weather affects agriculture. The changes have been quite drastic. This spring, there was a lot of rain. With constant rain, there’s not enough sunlight so the seeds would get mouldy.

The rain had a big impact on everyone’s vegetable crops. Seeds just wouldn’t germinate even if you kept sowing several times. Even bittercress, which used to be the easiest thing to grow, was small and slow-growing. We’ve never had a situation where crops couldn’t grow before. Usually after a rainy period, there would be a spell of good weather, and people would sow seeds then. But this year, it rained continuously. The soil was always wet, sticky, and muddy. The entire mountain was soaked.

My family also suffered loss. We grew some winter melons and sowed the seeds twice, but neither time did they germinate very well. Last year, we had a huge winter melon harvest, about 10,000 jin (£4,989). But this year, we only managed to harvest about 20 of them. With such a small yield, we couldn’t sell any and had to eat them ourselves. Almost one-fifth of our income from agriculture was gone.

Mould has been another big problem. Our warehouse is an old brick building, and there are leaks where the walls meet. The hawthorn, dried tangerine peel and dried sweet potatoes stored in our warehouse all became mouldy. Even the cardboard boxes had mould on them. We made a batch of green plum wine, bottled by a factory and stored in another warehouse. The paper labels became mouldy.

Flooding and high water levels have been seen in Qingyuan, Guangdong province. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

When the rain kept going down, people began to worry. In 2013, there was a flash flood in this area. It was one of those short but really intense downpours. There was so much water that the dam in the neighbouring village of Xianxi collapsed, and three people were swept away. Several households in our village were also flooded. People have always felt a bit haunted since then.

There is a dam up the hill that is a hidden danger. Its owner wasn’t taking care this year. Some of the pipes got damaged, and nobody fixed them. So it wasn’t generating electricity, and the water was just sitting in the reservoir up there. We were afraid that it might not be able to hold up.

It’s a tricky issue to address. The villagers would need to tell the unit head, who would then tell the village committee, and finally the committee would negotiate with the power plant owner. However, is it not as easy to work on a common problem together. The dynamics within a village can be intricate.

In our village, people are so used to changes in the weather that they don’t really have an idea about climate change. They have very specific observations, like more rain, hotter weather, and unpredictable weather patterns. People joke about not even being able to grow bittercress any more. But they tend to think that the weather has always been changing and that farming is all about adapting to these changes.

Some online conspiracy theories say climate change isn’t real, and scientists seem to always have to prove that it is. In reality, you can feel that it’s getting hotter. It’s definitely hotter than when I was a child, and the weather is much more unpredictable. There’s been more extreme rainfall and droughts. These are things that you can feel. In April, when we were selling fresh Japanese plums and processing them, I was checking everyone’s orchards every day. When I saw the ground all covered in fallen plums, I felt really frustrated.

It was such a waste; they’d been growing for a whole year, only to fall to the ground, get rotten, and unable to sell or eat. While fruit falling from trees is a natural phenomenon, this level of fruit drop was abnormal. Normally, people would harvest the fruit before it ripened and fell, but this year, the constant rain prevented harvesting. Seeing the orchards in that state, I felt really anxious and disheartened. I wondered what the point of all our hard work was if it was just going to end up like this.

A flooded island in Qingyuan, southern China, where more than 100,000 people were evacuated due to fatal floods and the government issuing its highest-level rainstorm warning in April. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

I sometimes feel a lot of anxiety, as if the world is caving in, though I don’t think other villagers feel that way. My sense of hopelessness extends beyond climate change. I don’t think too much about how climate change may affect my child. I’m more concerned about the state of the world in general. With capitalism and the growing wealth gap I feel quite pessimistic about the future. I’m worried about the increasing inequality in society.

Right now, I find hope in smaller initiatives, in sticking together and keeping each other warm. The work we’re doing at our collective business isn’t just for our own benefit; it also has a community aspect. We hope to create the opportunity for more people to earn money from home and to take care of their elderly parents.

After this year’s crop failures, we’ve been more proactive in bringing together younger, professional farmers to discuss common challenges and try to find solutions together. I feel that doing something like this gives me a little hope. It might not change any social policies, but it allows the people involved to take care of each other, and I think that’s really important.

• Edited by Aldyn Chwelos and Sean Holman
  Design and development by Harry Fischer and Pip Lev