Dragon Bay: Stories from a Chinese Village

Dragon Bay (Long Wan) is a village in Guangdong Province, China, a 40-minute ride by bicycle from Zhanjiang, a port city on the South China Sea. In the early 1990s, the author visited Dragon Bay to interview and photograph residents. He returned there in 2000 and 2005. Through photographs and text, Dragon Bay documents the struggles of rural families to improve their standard of living by developing small businesses, working at cash-paying temporary jobs in nearby cities and towns, and cultivating additional land to earn more income. Dragon Bay also documents the villagers' ongoing struggle to contend with a draconian birth-control policy, which included nighttime raids in which villagers who violated the policy were taken from the village and required to take measures to limit births. China has since discontinued this policy and is instead encouraging its citizens now to have more rather than fewer children.