Weekend Long Read: The People Powering China’s Garlic Capital

1. Jinxiang county in Shandong province is China's garlic capital, supplying over two-thirds of the world's exported garlic [para. 1][para. 3]. Each May, the roads are lined with garlic, and the pungent smell fills the air as freshly harvested bulbs are piled on roadsides [para. 1][para. 2]. The harvest season transforms the county into a vast seasonal workplace, with trucks waiting, drying racks being filled, and workers streaming in from neighboring counties [para. 2]. Beneath this abundance, the industry is undergoing a transition as mechanization spreads and younger workers seek opportunities elsewhere, forcing the labor force to adapt to a rapidly changing rural market [para. 4].

2. Garlic digging remains heavily dependent on manual labor, unlike wheat harvesting [para. 11]. Diggers work in teams of six or seven, using narrow iron shovels to dig bulbs out of the soil, then cut stalks and trim roots before drying [para. 11][para. 12]. Many workers are women or older people in their 60s [para. 12]. The labor market near the Highway Bureau wakes up at 3 a.m., with workers gathering under streetlights, carrying small stools to rest in fields [para. 6][para. 7][para. 8]. Around 4 a.m., when a car pulls over, dozens of workers swarm it to bargain over field size, soil hardness, and price [para. 9][para. 10]. During the peak season, the number of migrant workers reaches nearly 10,000 [CXIMG caption].

3. The work is physically demanding, but offers significant income for rural households, with many earning several hundred yuan a day [para. 13]. Wu Fusheng, a 64-year-old worker from Liaocheng, has rented out his family's land and relies on a modest rural pension; with his children married and factory jobs scarce, seasonal labor helps supplement his income [para. 14][para. 15]. He wants to "earn some pocket money, so that when I get sick and hospitalized in the future, I don't have to ask my children for money" [para. 16]. This sentiment is shared by many seasonal workers [para. 17]. A local saying among diggers captures the job's reality: "Jinxiang money is not easy to take; you're either kneeling or crawling" [para. 18].

4. Mechanization is gradually changing the labor-intensive work [para. 19]. Rising production costs and declining profitability have encouraged some farmers to adopt small garlic harvesting machines, while larger operators use equipment capable of harvesting dozens of acres daily [para. 20]. However, machines have not yet replaced most human diggers because Jinxiang's widespread practice of interplanting crops limits large-scale mechanization [para. 21]. Elsewhere in the industry, technology has already transformed work in cold storage facilities and processing centers, which once depended almost entirely on manual labor [para. 22][para. 23]. Now, forklifts move through standardized warehouses and electric screening machines sort garlic by size and quality, reducing demand for loaders and unloaders [para. 24][para. 25].

5. In processing plants, automated screening lines handle much of the sorting [para. 26][para. 27]. Lin Xianghui, a 33-year-old migrant from Inner Mongolia, works 12-hour days slicing open bags of garlic and emptying them onto conveyor belts, with machines separating bulbs and removing debris [para. 26][para. 27][para. 28]. Inside a garlic processing plant, Li Longmei, 36, inspects garlic cloves on a conveyor belt, removing damaged ones destined for export to over 100 countries [para. 30][CXIMG caption]. However, traditional hand sorting still exists, with older women nearby working with scissors and finger cots [para. 31]. The industry supports tens of thousands of jobs across planting, warehousing, logistics, processing, and e-commerce, but the workforce is changing [para. 29].

6. Younger entrepreneurs are introducing new sales methods [para. 32]. Liu Guosai, a university graduate who returned to Jinxiang in 2013, expanded his family's garlic business into e-commerce during the Covid-19 pandemic [para. 33][para. 34]. His operation now employs hundreds of workers, many older women from nearby villages, in packaging, warehousing, and logistics [para. 35]. Unlike traditional traders, e-commerce sellers compete on storytelling [para. 36]. Before dawn, livestream hosts gather in Liu's workshop, repeating phrases like "Direct dispatch from the workshop" to viewers across China [para. 37]. While printers produce shipping labels and workers package orders, e-commerce still accounts for only a small share of Jinxiang's garlic sales due to limited digital literacy, and much of the work behind online orders remains manual [para. 38][para. 39].