Love Stories in the Countryside

The Empire of Dirt and Dialect

If the American western is about the conquest of the frontier, the Chinese rural drama is about the conquest of the neighbor. In 2006, when Zhao Benshan released *Love Stories in the Countryside* (better known globally as *Country Love* or *Xiangcun Aiqing*), few predicted it would mutate into the longest-running television franchise in Chinese history. To the uninitiated, it appears to be a slapstick comedy about farmers bickering over tractors and tofu. But to view it merely as "content" is to miss its profound sociological weight. This is not just a sitcom; it is a chronicle of a vanishing world, a sprawling tapestry of Northeast Chinese (Dongbei) anxiety, ambition, and the suffocating intimacy of village life.



The genius of Zhao Benshan’s direction—and his performance as the wealthy tycoon Wang Dana—lies in his rejection of the pastoral ideal. In most cinema, the countryside is a place of quiet virtue. In *Love Stories in the Countryside*, the fictional village of Ivory Mountain is a battlefield of ego. The visual language is deceptively simple: flat lighting, static camera setups, and unglamorous costumes. Yet, this "anti-aesthetic" serves a crucial purpose. It forces the audience to focus entirely on the dialect—the rhythmic, banter-heavy *Dongbei* speech that Zhao elevated from regional folk art (Errenzhuan) to a national linguistic currency. The dust on the characters’ jackets feels real because it *is* real; the series refuses to polish the grime of rural existence.

At the heart of this saga are the "F4 of Ivory Mountain," a moniker given by fans to the central patriarchs, but the true emotional gravity orbits around two figures: Liu Neng and Xie Guangkun. Played by Wang Xiaoli and Tang Jianjun respectively, these men are not heroes. They are petty, jealous, controlling, and deeply flawed. Xie Guangkun, in particular, stands as one of the most fascinating villains in modern television—a man whose tyranny is exercised not with guns, but with guilt trips and family meetings.



The first season, released in 2006, captures a specific historical pivot point. It documents the friction between the old agrarian guard and the new "peasant entrepreneurs." The romance between the college-educated Xie Yongqiang and the tofu-selling Wang Xiaomeng is not just a love story; it is a collision of class aspirations. The tragedy, often masked by laugh tracks, is that the characters are trapped by their own pettiness. They aspire to modernity—buying cars, starting businesses—but cannot escape the feudal interpersonal dynamics of the village.

One cannot discuss this work without acknowledging the character of Xie Dajiao, the village matchmaker and grocery store owner. In a show dominated by fragile male egos, she serves as the emotional anchor and the judge of moral failures. Her grocery store is the village agora, the place where reputations are destroyed and rebuilt over bottles of soy sauce. Through her, the series explores the limited but potent agency of rural women in a patriarchal structure.



Ultimately, *Love Stories in the Countryside* succeeds because it dares to be repetitive. Life in a village *is* repetitive. The grudges do not end; they cycle. By 2006, China was racing toward a high-tech, urban future, leaving the countryside behind. Zhao Benshan froze this world in amber, creating a space where the stakes are comically low yet emotionally apocalyptic. It is a masterpiece of the mundane, proving that the most intense human dramas often happen not in skyscrapers, but at the dinner table of a brick house in Liaoning.