Farmhouse Fun: The Chinese Hit the Road; Urban professionals, in love with their cars, are looking for somewhere to go. That's great news for farmers.

Byline: Craig Simons

Xu Jing parks his Honda Odyssey beside a burbling stream and takes out the fishing rods. The 33-year-old banker, his wife, Yang Lei, and a friend are trying to catch their lunch in a 10-square-meter concrete pool in the countryside north of Beijing. Soon the owners of Folkways Vacation Village, a simple brick guesthouse, will gut their carp catch, coat it with ground chilies and grill it over an open fire. "It's very relaxing here," Yang says. Most appealing, they agree, is that they set their own schedule: after lunch they might go for a hike before settling down to a game of mah-jongg. Or not.

Like millions of Chinese urban professionals, the trio is simply enjoying their newfound freedom of mobility. Before the 1980s nearly all Chinese made do with bicycles, but the country's economic transition has unlocked a passion for autos. More than 2 million cars were sold in China last year--80 percent more than in 2002. And with the car boom, Chinese are discovering the joy of road trips.

That's turned out to be a blessing for local farmers like Liu Jinglong. In the late 1990s Liu noticed more and more cars with Beijing license plates passing through his village of Duijiuyu, about 52 kilometers from the capital. Some of the urban refugees stopped to ask if they could buy a home-cooked meal or even stay the night. So in 1998 Liu invested a few thousand dollars and built half a dozen rooms (each complete with a traditional clay bed--called a kang --heated by coals), dug three fish ponds, hung a few red lanterns and opened for business. Nowadays, Folkways Vacation Village is almost always full on weekends. Liu ...