State-Enterprise Restructuring, Empty-Nest Elderly, a Vanishing Old City: What a 75-Year-Old Hohhot Photographer Has Recorded

A camera can change only so much. He keeps going anyway.

Twice in Ren Zhiming's 75 years, what he did drew the whole country's attention. The first time was in 2005. Huang Peishu, a woman known as the "White-Haired Girl," had lived in a cave in Helin County outside Hohhot for more than 20 years; Ren introduced her story to the national press, and she eventually left the cave for her hometown in Sichuan. The second was in 2006, when his photographs of Laoniuwan, a village in Hohhot's Qingshuihe County, going from destitute to tourist destination won him an invitation to bring two villagers to Beijing and tape an episode of A Date with Luyu called "Laoniuwan: A Fate Changed by the Camera."

Both were more than a decade ago. But they left Ren convinced, to this day, that a camera can change things. The evidence is piled up in his 80-square-meter photography studio on Ordos Street in Hohhot's Saihan District — even though the street's own history has been all but forgotten.

Ordos Street runs 664 meters from the southern end of Hulunbuir South Road in the east to Xilingol South Road in the west, and is 15 meters wide. It looks like any commercial street: restaurants, sportswear chain stores and clothing shops line the road, several residential-and-commercial developments have gone up, and at the center of the block sits CapitaMall, the busiest spot on the street.

Few people remember that before 2003 this road had another name: Nohemule. These days only two things might jog anyone's memory. In July 2017, the Inner Mongolia Morning Post published the station names for the Line 2 subway then under construction, and the Hualian "CapitaMall" station was renamed "Nohemule." In March this year, the 2018 Supreme People's Court Work Report listed more than 30 landmark guiding cases; one of them, the well-known wrongful conviction in the "1996 Huugjilt case," happened on Nohemule Street.

In Mongolian, "Nohemule" means "textile," and the site CapitaMall now occupies was once the Inner Mongolia No. 1 Wool Textile Mill, "No. 1 Wool" for short. Before 1998, the mills from "No. 1 Wool" to "No. 6 Wool" were clustered along the south side of this street. The north side held Soviet-style peaked-roof workers' dormitories with everything a life needed — 38-square-meter units, red-tile roofs, flush toilets, a school, an auditorium — known at the time as Hohhot's "Dongjiaomin Lane," after Beijing's legation quarter. After the forced state-enterprise restructuring and bankruptcy of 1998, a real-estate company bought the mill's land and the shantytown was rebuilt as the "Shandan" residential compound. More than 2,000 workers were laid off, at a loss to find another living just as they were nearing 30.

Ren Zhiming remembers all of it. Laid off in 1998 from the mill where he had worked for 40 years, he was 55, and he has spent almost all his time since on documentary photography about Hohhot. Besides the laid-off workers, before and after, he photographed pollution from small coal mines on the upper Yellow River, the redevelopment of Hohhot's old town, and empty-nest elderly people in the poor counties outside the city. Huang Peishu, the "White-Haired Girl," and Laoniuwan are the two best cases from those 20 years behind the camera.

His studio, on the second floor of Building 7 in the Shandan compound, looks like a miniature museum. A quarter of the small living room's walls are covered with posters from years of solo photography exhibitions; another quarter with text and pictures from the A Date with Luyu episode on Laoniuwan. On top of a shelf, a cattle skull is heaped with empty green Kodak film canisters. Along the left side of the room are a bed, two desks, two or three printing machines, and a bookcase stuffed with thousands of undeveloped negatives. On the right are a darkroom and a storage room; besides dozens of trophies, the storage room holds several old cameras and enlargers.

Ren spends most of every day here. He gets up at 5 a.m., walks five minutes to Hulunbuir South Road, orders a steamer of shaomai dumplings and eats them slowly, dipped in vinegar, then walks back to the studio to sort film, papers and photographic records.

From the studio window he can see straight across to the CapitaLand center. He still wanders over now and then. The north gate, once the main entrance to "No. 1 Wool," is now used to deliver goods to the mall. Walk straight in and two old warehouses built with the help of Soviet experts are still standing, though empty. Next door, the "Shandan Cashmere Shop" is still open — it belongs to the Jinyu Group now — but hardly anyone goes in.

Two mill buildings known for their sawtooth roofs are also still standing. The design lets light in only through north-facing windows, keeping it soft and steady for weaving, and people still get the benefit of it: one building is used as a warehouse, and the other was leased early this year to the "Wang Changchun Art Studio," which coaches middle- and high-school students for art-school entrance exams at 1,500 yuan for 20 class sessions.

Ren still keeps three blue Nohemule Street signs, which he quietly picked up when the street was renamed in 2003. There is no shortage of similar objects: a factory honor trophy with a piece missing, a wooden shuttle that fell off a machine.

He has one wish: to turn the mill building into a wool-textile museum.

The Rise and Fall of the Wool Mills

Inner Mongolia today has more than 23 million people, of whom only 2.8 million are ethnic Mongols; most of the rest descend from migrants who came from Shanxi and Shaanxi in the movement known as Zouxikou, "going out through the western pass." Zouxikou had two streams: migrant farmers who came and went with the seasons to open up farmland, and merchants who traveled to trade with Mongol communities. Ren Zhiming's father, Ren Hai, belonged to the second group, and Ren Zhiming was born in Shuozhou, Shanxi, on the road west.

In 1946 the family moved to Guihua, the old town of Hohhot (today's Yuquan District), where Ren Hai ran small businesses in front of the Xiao Zhao and Da Zhao temples — a grain shop, a goods depot, local produce — under the name "Ronghegong." In 1954, when the policy of joint state-private ownership arrived, "Ronghegong" was folded, as private property, into the Tongle Theater on Daxi Street, and Ren Hai became a salaried employee there, spending the rest of his working life in the old playhouse.

Ren Zhiming had no interest in the theater. In 1954, having just turned 11, he wanted to go on to junior high like his two older brothers. But it was not a good moment to keep studying. That year the Central Propaganda Department issued a document, "Outline for Publicizing Labor and Production Among Graduates of Senior Primary and Junior Secondary Schools," which made three points: the task of education in New China was to raise the people's labor productivity; raising the people's cultural level had to rest on the growth of production; and in New China, workers, peasants and other laboring people had become masters of the state, so labor had become a glorious and lofty calling.

In early 1956, the newly built Inner Mongolia Wool Textile Mill — the forerunner of the Inner Mongolia No. 1 Wool Textile Mill — went into production as one of the state's Second Five-Year Plan projects. As the Hohhot Wool Textile Mill Gazetteer records it, "college and technical-school graduates from Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, Xi'an and other big cities, filled with passion, answered the call of the motherland and marched into Inner Mongolia in great numbers." These were Inner Mongolia's first generation of textile workers. The mill also recruited apprentices from around the country. The requirements were simple: a primary-school diploma, good health, and no serious problem with one's family background (children of landlords and rich peasants were accepted too). Most of the apprentices came from Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong and other provinces, from the Northeast, and from the banners and counties around Hohhot. The mills eventually employed 12,000 textile workers; with their families, 50,000 to 60,000 people lived around Nohemule Street.

The mill's slogans then were "Let everyone in the country have clothes to wear" and "Finish 20 years of work in 10."

Ren Zhiming was one of the apprentices who answered the call. He was 15 when he started. His job was washing wool, for 15 yuan a month, and it was punishing work. Raw wool caked in sheep dung had to be carried into a 100-meter machine and made into wool tops; the tops were boiled in 50-degree water with soda ash and soap; the water was squeezed out, the tops rinsed again in warm water and finally dried. He washed 1,000 to 2,000 tons a year. The carding machines shook 120 times a minute and were deafening, and most of the workers ended up with racing hearts and poor hearing. During the Great Leap Forward the workday ran 12 hours. Only five or six people worked the whole floor, and even the senior master was two or three years older than Ren.

With his first paycheck he gave 8 yuan to his parents and saved the rest. The next year he spent 12 or 13 yuan on a secondhand Shanghai-made Xingfu 120 twin-lens camera and taught himself photography. His thinking was simple: he would probably spend his whole life washing wool, and he wanted a hobby to pass the time.

Being a "Learn from Lei Feng" activist at the mill did not spare him the upheaval that followed. Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, 500 people were taken away from mills No. 1 through No. 4, Ren among them. His enlarger and his negatives were confiscated, along with the 15 journals he had kept while learning from Lei Feng. He spent nearly two years in labor reform, doing every kind of work: cleaning the toilets shared by 2,000 workers, cleaning the bathhouse that held 4,000 people, digging an air-raid tunnel five meters deep that ran from Nohemule Street all the way to the Daqing Mountains.

Once cleared, Ren was seconded in turn to the Inner Mongolia Legal Affairs Company, the Inner Mongolia Daqing Office and the Department of Light Industry, mostly on propaganda work — making, for instance, plain-language booklets on wool textiles and animal husbandry to hand out to herders. Over those three or four years he also took training courses at three universities to make up for the schooling he had missed. Compared with his eldest brother, a university graduate, he counted himself lucky: the eldest brother, chief engineer at "No. 1 Wool," killed himself during the upheaval. Ren kept his brother's black-and-white television set, which now sits by the studio entrance, under the black-and-white family portrait from the Zouxikou journey.

In 1978, "No. 1 Wool" was restructured to run on "market economy" lines. That year the State Administration for Industry and Commerce was founded, and its first document required all goods to be registered with trademarks by category. Ren was transferred back to the mill, to the New Product Development Office, as a senior arts-and-crafts designer and deputy section chief. "Shandan" — the tiger lily — was one of the brand marks he designed then: very simple, a white ground with a single red tiger lily in the middle.

After designing more than a dozen trademarks, he spent half a year doing market research around the country — "I went to every city except Tibet, Urumqi and Taiwan" — looking at how local climate, customs and dress habits related to what a mill should make. Back at the mill he wrote a report of more than a hundred pages laying out the several hundred wool-textile brands in the country, what share of sales each held in every city, and what product varieties existed.

The report caught the eye of the mill's new director, a "worker-peasant-soldier" college graduate sent from Nanjing to help develop the frontier. On his first day in the job he read the whole thing at his desk and immediately wired Ren, who was still out on the road: "Return to the mill at once." Ren went from the train station straight to the factory office and found an empty room and a key. "Get people together and start right away — whatever you want to do, do it now."

The New Product Development Office's first move was to try to save the mill with advertising. Besides trailing the coastal regions in colors and varieties, "No. 1 Wool" still packed its goods the old way, in kraft paper and burlap sacks. Ren led a small team in redesigning more than a dozen posters for different product lines, then entered them on his own initiative in the first National Advertising Competition. After they won a gold award there and showed at the 15th National Photography Exhibition, he had 1.5 million copies printed and sent to department stores across the country.

Even now the designs hold some charm: blue and red yarn laid out to look like a sea and a rising sun; a woman with bright red nail polish drawing back a veil made from "No. 1 Wool's" newest patterned long-staple cotton. This was 1983.

The 1980s were also, as it happened, the friendliest policy years the textile industry ever had. The year before "No. 1 Wool" won its advertising award, People's Daily published the Sixth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (1981-1985), whose textile section called for adding 470,000 spindles of wool-spinning capacity over five years, and for building and expanding wool-top capacity by 30,000 tons in wool-producing regions such as Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, and in Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin, which used large amounts of imported wool.

From 1993 to 1995 the No. 1 Wool Textile Mill won the national Golden Bridge Award for best-selling products three years running, and began shifting from mostly domestic sales to exports, opening up 30 or 40 markets in Eastern and Western Europe and Southeast Asia. By 1995, as Ren remembers it, the mill had grown to 6 joint ventures, 3 wholly owned subsidiaries, 3 branch factories and a number of partner plants. It employed 4,200 people. Annual output ran to 3,000 tons of knitting wool, 200 tons of cashmere yarn, 50 tons of camel wool, 150,000 cashmere sweaters, 100,000 cashmere scarves, 200,000 pieces of wool fashion wear, 1,000 tons of dyed cotton yarn and 600 tons of combed wool tops. Total industrial output value came to 262 million yuan, 39 times what it had cost to build the mill, and annual sales reached 180 million yuan.

The good years did not last. As the market opened up, small family workshops multiplied along Nohemule Street. To lift their margins and undercut the big mills on price, the workshops often cheated, mixing rabbit fur or sand into the wool. As Ren remembers it, the Hebei people on Nohemule Street formed a tight circle that cornered the supply of raw wool.

Oversupply was the other problem. After 1995, stock piled up at the mills and earnings fell. When the mill could not pay wages, it paid in wool instead, and after each shift Nohemule Street filled with workers selling it. The last straw may have been an order from a buyer in southern China, who had bought more than a hundred tons of fine cashmere yarn. When the delivery date came, the buyer inspected the goods, found the yarn uneven in thickness and refused it. The city trade union organized workers from the various mills to buy it up and handed out coupons. Even after the price fell to 23 yuan a jin, the yarn would not sell.

Meanwhile, in 1997, then-Premier Zhu Rongji proposed at two regional forums with factory directors that textiles be made a priority sector for mergers, bankruptcies and re-employment programs — the breakthrough point for state-enterprise reform. Two years later the State Economic and Trade Commission published its "Catalogue for Eliminating Outdated Production Capacity, Processes and Products," and wool textiles were among the first 114 items on it.

Du Yuzhou, president of the China National Textile Industry Association, looked back on this history of "structural adjustment" in a 2005 interview, saying that in the 1990s "1.2 million textile workers were laid off, and a large number of state-owned enterprises exited the industry."

At the end of 1997 the Hohhot Intermediate People's Court declared the No. 1 Wool Textile Mill bankrupt, and it was later bought by the Inner Mongolia Jinyu Group, whose main businesses are real estate and biopharmaceuticals. "No. 2 Wool," "No. 3 Wool" and "No. 4 Wool" were also bought by real-estate companies around 2000, and on their sites rose, in turn, the Dianli Jiayuan residential compound, Jinyu Plaza and the Victoria Shopping Mall.

Among the laid-off staff, most of the technical workers were poached by small Hebei firms nearby, and Ren Zhiming, then 55, was invited to design trademarks for them too. He refused, still carrying a certain pride — "I'm not going to sew the wedding dress for a competitor," he said — and simply retired. Despite his rank of senior engineer, he was allotted only a 50-square-meter welfare apartment. The mill's stated reason: "You are a model worker, and we made this decision out of respect for your selflessness." Ren accepted it without complaint.

Some quick-thinking workers found their own way out. Ren recorded three of them on his blog. Sang Dejun set up a street stall on Nohemule Street selling eyeglasses to help support his family. After Lin Shurong's husband died, her son was laid off and took a severance buyout and her daughter-in-law fell ill, so Lin made a living collecting scrap and put her grandchildren through college on it. Wang Jianqi's family had six people across two generations leave their jobs, so he took a 16,000-yuan severance buyout, went into business with the money, and in 2003 founded "Jianqi Arts and Crafts Decoration Shop," still operating today.

Most workers, though, have found it hard to move past what they once thought of as their glory days. The "Shandan" logo was moved to the gate of the dormitory compound, and the "flock of sheep" sculpture that had toppled at the mill gate was set up again in the flowerbed at the community entrance.

But "Dongjiaomin Lane" lost its life after that. In Xingkang Community alone, one of the neighborhoods east of Nohemule, the elderly make up as much as 20% of the population; 513 elderly residents are disabled and 380 live alone. The rate of unnatural deaths among them keeps rising. Some have killed themselves to free up an apartment for a child's wedding; others, never recovering after being laid off, have died at home and gone undiscovered for a week to several months.

"For empty-nest elderly in the countryside it's an economic problem; in the city it's a psychological one," Ren summed up. He then showed QDaily a list of unnatural deaths among laid-off workers in the Shandan compound:

Mr. Jiang, 56, male, suicide in 1982 (advanced producer); Mr. Bian, 58, male, died at home in 1992, found a week later; Ms. Zhao, 68, female, wandered off with dementia and died outside the village in 1997 (advanced producer); Mr. Bai, 60, male, froze to death on the road in 1998 (advanced producer); Ms. Li, 40, female, suicide by poison in 1999 (severance buyout); Ms. Cai, 66, female, died at home in 2007, found a week later; Ms. Zhao, 43, female, jumped to her death in 2008 (a model worker before her severance buyout); Ms. Zhao, 70, female, suicide by poison in 2009 (advanced producer); Mr. Jia, 67, male, died of poisoning while suffering dementia in 2011 (advanced producer); Ms. Yun, 68, female, died at home in 2013, found three months later; Ms. Geng, 81, female, suicide by poison in 2014 (advanced producer); Mr. Wang, 72, male, drowned himself in a lake in 2015.

Huang Peishu and Li Runsheng, the "Empty-Nest Elderly"

After retiring, Ren Zhiming spent 10,000 yuan of his own money in 2003 to print a photo collection, Documentary Photographs of the Lives of "Empty-Nest" Elderly. Of the five counties around Hohhot, three were then nationally designated poor counties: Helin, Qingshuihe and Wuchuan. Young people went out to work and left the old at home alone. These were the people he photographed most on his trips.

Before 2005, Ren took the collection to Beijing and called on People's Daily, China Youth Daily and China Senior Citizens News, hoping to get the press interested. Most would not let him in the door. The kindest response came from a staff member at China Senior Citizens News, who poured him a cup of tea: "There's no way we can report this. Finish your tea and please go home."

Then, in 2005, something big happened. At the Fifth Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee that October, the phrase "the three rural issues" — agriculture, the countryside and farmers — was raised formally for the first time, and "empty-nest elderly" went onto the agenda as one of the problems farmers face.

After that, this never-formally-published collection of Ren's found plenty of uses. A local entrepreneur who ran a cosmetics company in Shanghai came to the studio to learn photography, happened to leaf through it, and invited Ren to give a talk on "empty-nest elderly" at the company's annual meeting. At the talk, the shrewd boss called on everyone to hand over the year-end bonuses they had received that morning to set up a "charity fund," and announced on the spot that Ren Zhiming would be its deputy chairman.

The event raised 1 million yuan in all, of which 250,000 yuan eventually went to buying rice cookers for empty-nest elderly in Qingshuihe County. What happened to the rest, even the deputy chairman does not know. That turned out to be the only thing the "charity fund" ever did; Ren never heard anything about it again.

Su Xiaodong and Liu Li were both new reporters at the Inner Mongolia Morning Post at the time. A month after the plenary session ended, they came to this studio in the Shandan compound, asking for news leads about "empty-nest" elderly. Ren told them, "There's someone more pitiable still — a Sichuan woman who has been living in a cave for 21 years."

This was Huang Peishu, later known as the "White-Haired Girl." In the 1980s she was trafficked from Zhongjiang County in Sichuan to Sanjuyao Village in Sandaoying Township, Helin County, more than 100 kilometers from Hohhot, and resold several times after that. Her fourth husband, Sun Runshan, who could not afford a wife any other way, bought her for more than 1,000 yuan. After her child died, the shock left her mentally ill; she moved into a cave, her hair gone white, slept among rats and chickens, and lived on food the villagers brought her.

Huang Peishu was not a typical "empty-nest" case, but her life was wretched enough. After the Inner Mongolia Morning Post's report appeared, Sichuan Television, China Central Television, scholars, experts and sympathetic members of the public all gathered outside her cave. An ambulance took her to the Inner Mongolia Mental Health Center; the civil affairs department paid 5,000 yuan for her treatment, moved her household registration from Inner Mongolia back to Zhongjiang, and put her under the "Five Guarantees," with a living allowance of 100 yuan a month. A television reporter pushed a microphone at Ren Zhiming: "You knew about her for so long — why didn't you say something sooner?"

Besides Huang Peishu, the Inner Mongolia Morning Post followed Ren's leads into a special series on "empty-nest elderly" that ran more than 20 days straight. A reporter from Southern Weekly picked out another case in it: "Laoniuwan."

Laoniuwan sits in Qingshuihe County, 200 kilometers southwest of Hohhot. Between 1988 and 2001, as young people left one after another to work elsewhere, the village's population fell from more than 300 to just over 60 and it became a village of the old. It happens to sit where the Yellow River and the Yangtze meet, and across the water are Shanxi's Wanghelou tower and an old Ming-dynasty stone cave-dwelling village, which drew a fair number of photographers.

In 2003, a local property developer, Ren Zhigang, was introduced by a tourism-bureau official to the Hohhot Photographers Association; after seeing pictures by Ren Zhiming and others, he decided to put money into a tourism project at Laoniuwan. The village's income sources suddenly multiplied: demolition compensation, construction work, guesthouses. Young people came back, and cave dwellings that had once rented for 100 yuan now went for nearly 30,000.

Southern Weekly put the story into its Spring Festival special report of January 2006, "Empty-Nest Elderly in the Countryside: Who Will Care for Them?" under the headline "Laoniuwan: Changed by the Camera." One of the people in it was Li Runsheng, whose four children all worked away from home, and who had all but dragged Ren Zhiming into taking a funeral portrait of his ailing wife while she was still alive.

Four months later, A Date with Luyu sent Ren an invitation too. The episode's title echoed Southern Weekly's: Laoniuwan: A Fate Changed by the Camera. Ren again brought Li Runsheng, along with Li Si, a young man who had come home from working away.

For Li Runsheng, then 80, it was his first time out of the village and his first time in Beijing. He posed in front of the red-painted train, the Beijing railway station and Tiananmen Square, astonished by everything he saw. Eating at the Beijing Ziyu Hotel, arranged by the production team, Li Si asked him how much the meal must cost. "At least 20 yuan, I'd guess," Li Runsheng said. Ren had to push him into the bathtub in the hotel room to get him to bathe — "this much water would last my family half a year" — and he soaked for more than an hour.

On the show, Luyu asked him, "Do a lot of tourists come to your village now?" "A lot." "How do they get there?" "Fly from Beijing to Hohhot, then a bus from Hohhot to Qingshuihe County, then from the county to the village." "Grandpa, you have to stay healthy and wait for us to come visit, all right?" "All right. I'll make fried cakes for you."

A Date with Luyu: Laoniuwan, a Fate Changed by the Camera

Li Runsheng died two years later, skin and bones by the end. He had spent all of his resettlement compensation from the Wanjiazhai Reservoir project on treating his wife, Zhao Ene, and had no money left to build a new cave dwelling as other villagers did. The one cave he had was rented, and even that landlord stopped renting it to him, meaning to take it back and run a guesthouse. Ren contacted the A Date with Luyu team to ask whether Luyu had time to come and see him, and got no reply. A year later Zhao Ene died too.

In 2013, Ren wrote a proposal and mailed it to the Great Hall of the People, suggesting that empty Hope Primary Schools in the countryside be turned into self-service retirement homes. "Walk through the villages and you'll see it — the young have all gone out to work, and many take their children along. Of the great batch of Hope Primary Schools built back then, few still work as schools. The smallest I've seen has two children in the whole place. Meanwhile it's the old who have no one to look after them." The proposal drew no response.

Today Laoniuwan is the "Laoniuwan Yellow River Grand Canyon 5A-rated scenic area." The company Ren Zhigang used to develop the site 13 years ago, Qingshuihe County Laoniuwan Yellow River Culture and Tourism Co., has since been deregistered, but a search for "Laoniuwan" on Tianyancha turns up 823 related companies.

Besides Laoniuwan, the other place Ren showed reporters most often in 2005 was Laoniupo, another poor village in Qingshuihe County that got far less attention. Five years later its turn came too — not through "empty-nest elderly" but through "red tourism." In May 2010, the Hohhot Party Committee and municipal government named the Laoniupo village Party branch a "National Patriotic Education Base." By 2017, government departments and colleges had made nearly 60,000 person-visits to Laoniupo for Party organizational activities and Party lessons, including more than 4,500 person-visits by college students in the "Three Rural Outreach" program.

On July 16, the front page of Hohhot Daily reported that the city was conducting its municipal-level preliminary review of Qingshuihe County's exit from the provincial list of poor counties.

The Vanished Old Town of Guihua, the Collapsed South Wall of Pingyao

Ren Zhiming has only one formally published photo collection, Yuquan Treasury: Old Architecture and Residences of Hohhot, with 280 photographs of more than 50 streets and lanes and nearly a hundred courtyard homes and gatehouses. He calls this "rescue photography."

Yuquan District sits in the southwest of Hohhot, on the site of the old town of Guihua. Guihua was built in the Ming dynasty, mainly for commerce, religion and housing. It followed the traditional central-axis layout but combined Mongol and Han features: Tibetan Buddhist lama temples such as Da Zhao, Xiao Zhao, Xilitu Zhao and Wuta Si Zhao, old shop streets, and large stretches of northern-style courtyard housing.

Ren spent his whole childhood here. He remembers that his father's business went badly and he had eight mouths to feed alone, so the family moved countless times chasing the cheapest rent. "I lived on Qipan Street, Xiaozhao Bandao Street, Xiwushijia Street, Dazhaoqian Street, Xinsheng Street, Nanmeirenqiao Street, Xixiao Street and more, and finally rented a proper south-facing room that actually got sunlight at No. 17 Cuihuagong Lane."

Today most of these streets survive only as names; the gatehouses, pavilions, grand courtyards and small ones are gone. Shan Jixiang, director of the Palace Museum, criticized this in January 2015 in a lecture hall at the Inner Mongolia Museum, saying, "In recent years some cities, Hohhot among them, have gone in for large-scale demolition and construction while neglecting the protection of cultural heritage, damaging these cities' cultural spaces, severing their historical fabric, breaking up communities and neighborhoods, and finally erasing urban memory."

According to Zhang Xiaodong, head of the Ancient Architecture Research Office of the Hohhot Cultural Relics Administration, speaking publicly in 2006, a cultural-relics survey in the 1980s found that Hohhot still had more than 1,000 immovable relics; by the mid-1990s there were still more than 800; but by the time protection was formally designated in 2003, only just over 100 could be selected. In the more than 20 years between the city's second relics survey (1981-1985) and its third (2007-2011), 210 immovable relics disappeared, 118 of them in the four urban districts, and 40 of those in Yuquan District alone. Over the same years Hohhot's population grew from 1.65 million to 2.87 million, and the built-up city spread from 60 square kilometers to 240.

In 1998, Mu Lin, owner of the Jinchuan Gas Company in Xilinhot, moved more than 800 Ming and Qing buildings out of old Guihua whole, hauling them to the suburban Jinchuan Development Zone, where he spent ten years building a Mongol-Yuan Culture Museum; most of the remaining courtyard houses were levelled. One visitor remarked, "Taken from their original sites, these century-old houses, transplanted for people to look at, are nothing but cold, lifeless buildings that have lost all memory and feeling."

Not until 2015 did the Hohhot Urban Master Plan (2011-2020), approved by the State Council, say that the city should "draw up a special protection plan for its status as a historical and cultural city ... giving priority to historical and cultural districts such as Saishang Old Street-Da Zhao and Xilitu Zhao-Dashengkui, to important sites such as the earthen town at Helinger and the ruins of Yunzhong Commandery, and to cultural-heritage protection units of every level and their surroundings, such as the mansion of Princess Kejing and the tomb of Wang Zhaojun." In the Hohhot Urban Master Plan (1996-2010), approved in 1999, the core phrase had been "accelerating urban modernization."

In Ren Zhiming's experience, when it comes to protecting old buildings, what photography can do is mostly record; beyond that its power is small. In August 2000 he went to Pingyao to shoot and found the 600-year-old south wall of the ancient city sitting in sewage. He followed the wall to find the source. It was not hard — only 2.5 kilometers away, and a few shovelfuls of earth would have sent the sewage into a drainage channel instead. But a villager told him: "Plugging it is no use, someone will just dig it open again. If the wall weren't soaking in sewage, who would invest in Pingyao?"

Ren wrote to the environmental protection bureau, submitted photographs to the national "Two Sessions," contacted the press and mounted environmental photo exhibitions. Nothing came back. On the afternoon of October 17, 2004, the south wall of Pingyao's ancient city collapsed. That year, ticket revenue at the ancient city had risen from 1.25 million yuan seven years earlier to 40 million.

Ren Zhiming is still taking photographs. Besides holding exhibitions and talking to reporters, for the past 15 years he has written up the problems he found on his trips as proposals and mailed them to the Great Hall of the People, on schedule every March 1, four days before the Two Sessions open. He has sent 49 letters, mostly about poverty, help for disabled old people and the protection of old villages. Every proposal gets a text message confirming receipt, and nothing after that.

He plans to keep sending them.

Cover image photographed by Ren Zhiming.