The Long March of a Blade of Grass

I. Grass and Mushrooms

In the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, in the Rufa district, at five in the morning, Freda Korarom crouches in her mushroom shed, where dew drips through the gaps in the banana leaves. In the cultivation bags before her, grey-white oyster mushrooms are emerging from a type of grass she had never seen before.

Three years ago, she was still cutting firewood and farming in the mountains, never imagining she would grow mushrooms. Mushrooms are a rarity here, affordable only to city dwellers. But now, her farm employs twenty-five people and produces over two hundred kilograms of fresh mushrooms weekly. With the earnings, she built a house and sent her two children to school.

"Professor Lin told me these grasses are called 'Juncao,'" she says. "I didn't believe it at the time. How can grass grow mushrooms?"

That "Professor Lin" is Lin Zhanxi, now eighty-two years old. At this moment, he is likely in some African village, crouching to inspect the soil. But whenever Freda thinks of him, the same image always comes to mind: that elderly Chinese man with his trousers rolled up to his knees, standing in the muddy fields of Rufa, holding a handful of wild grass, saying to her, "Try this."

To understand this image, one must go back forty years to a laboratory in Fujian, China.

In 1983, forty-year-old Lin Zhanxi was researching edible fungi at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. At that time, Chinese farmers were beginning to grow mushrooms for profit, but mushroom cultivation required wood—each ton of mushrooms consumed three to four cubic meters of timber. Fujian's forests were being felled at an alarming rate.

"Can we replace wood with grass?" he asked himself in the lab.

At that time, no one in the world had seriously answered this question. Grass also contains cellulose, but its structure differs from wood, making it difficult for fungal mycelium to decompose. He spent three years testing over a hundred grass species—fern, five-node grass, elephant grass, reeds. Failure after failure, restart after restart. In 1986, using a wild grass called "mangqi," he successfully grew the first shiitake mushroom.

Farmers were skeptical: "Growing mushrooms with wild grass? Are you joking?" He had to rent land and build sheds himself to demonstrate. Three months later, large, plump mushrooms emerged. He showed them a grass called "giant juncao"—it can grow three to four meters tall in a year and regrows quickly after cutting. One mu of giant juncao is equivalent to over ten mu of forest.

"Light, heat, and water—three resources cycled; plants, animals, and fungi—three organisms cultivated in a cycle." This technology was named "Juncao Technology."

But at the time, no one imagined that this wild grass from a Fujian laboratory would, thirty years later, change half the globe.

II. The People Who Wore Leaves

In 1996, the governor of the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea visited Fujian and, before leaving, asked Lin Zhanxi: "Our farmers are very poor. Could you come and teach us?"

The following year, Lin Zhanxi led a five-member team to Papua New Guinea.

When the plane landed at Goroka Airport, he was fifty-three. The drive from the airport to Rufa took a full day, and the road worsened as they went deeper into the mountains. He witnessed a scene he would never forget: groups of men, women, and children, clad only in leaves, living in thatched huts, with fires on the ground and pots boiling root vegetables.

"At that time, the district officer told me there were over fifty thousand people here, more than 80% still wearing leaves and lacking three meals a day," Lin Zhanxi later recalled. "The world had already entered the late twentieth century, and there were still people like this. As a scientist, I had no reason not to help them."

But helping was far harder than imagined.

The Eastern Highlands Province sits at an altitude of over two thousand meters, with large temperature differences between day and night and a long rainy season. The team stayed in empty school rooms without electricity, using kerosene lamps at night. Mosquitoes were overwhelming, and several team members contracted malaria. The most daunting challenge was security—Rufa was in a tribal economy, with frequent conflicts. Once, a minister helped buy blankets for the team, but they were robbed en route by another tribe. The next day, the minister's tribe mobilized, faces painted with war paint, armed with knives and bows, singing war songs, ready for battle. It took the provincial government to convene a peace meeting to quell the dispute.

Lin Zhanxi's team did not retreat. They simplified the technology: no complex equipment, no expensive materials, only the wild juncao grasses abundant locally—elephant grass, thatch grass. Chop, bag, sterilize, inoculate, then teach farmers to control humidity, harvest, and store.

On January 14, 1998, the PNG government held a grand field day in Rufa to celebrate the successful demonstration of juncao technology. Over five thousand people came from across the country, some walking for three days and nights. The Governor-General, Deputy Prime Minister, and eight ministers attended. People crowded around the mushroom sheds, looking at the white flowers growing from grass. Some laughed, some cried, and some knelt to touch the cultivation bags as if touching a miracle.

PNG friends named juncao "Lin Grass"—in the Rufa dialect, the name sounds similar to "grass of life."

III. The Cost

If the story ended here, it would be a perfect fairy tale. But it is not.

Lin Zhanxi had a younger brother, Lin Zhanhua, also a member of the juncao team, who traveled the world with his brother. Around 2005, Lin Zhanhua contracted a severe infection during overseas promotion work, and his health deteriorated. He returned to China for treatment, but the disease progressed too quickly. Before he died, he told his brother: "Continue the juncao work."

When Lin Zhanhua passed away, Lin Zhanxi was at a project site in Africa. He did not see his brother's final moments. Team members said that after receiving the call, Lin Zhanxi sat in his room for a long time, not crying, just silent. The next day, he appeared at the training session as usual, teaching farmers the inoculation technique. But some noticed that his hands, holding the test tube, trembled more than usual.

"I have thought about stopping," Lin Zhanxi later said. "But whenever I think of those leaf-clad people in PNG, or Freda crouching in her mushroom shed, I feel I cannot stop."

In 2024, at eighty-one, he visited Africa no fewer than five times. Since his first trip abroad in 1996, he has been to Africa over forty times, renewing passports one after another, visa pages densely stamped. His back is beginning to stoop, and he needs support when walking, but in the fields, he can still crouch down, dig into the soil with his hands, and inspect the roots of juncao.

"When will you retire?"

"When I no longer recognize juncao."

IV. No Answers, Only Questions

In May 2023, Freda, as a female representative, attended the Eighth UN Science and Technology Innovation Forum in New York. It was her first time leaving PNG, her first time on a plane, her first time speaking before so many foreigners.

After her speech, a European journalist raised his hand and asked: "Ms. Korarom, aren't you concerned? The Chinese have done many projects in Africa, but the outside world generally believes they are truly interested in minerals and ports. Mushrooms... sound more like public relations."

Freda was taken aback. She didn't understand "public relations," but she understood the tone. That tone was familiar—like the expressions on villagers' faces when they heard she was going to learn mushroom cultivation from the Chinese.

"Sir," she said, "my country has no oil, no diamonds, no ports that China wants. We only have mountains, grass, and very poor people. When Professor Lin first came to Rufa, he stayed in a school room without electricity, contracted malaria, and was nearly caught in tribal conflict. If he were after minerals, why would he come to us?"

The room was silent for a few seconds. Then someone applauded.

Freda later told me she wasn't trying to defend China. She just wanted to state the facts she had seen: before that Chinese old man came, no foreigner had ever visited her village—not because there were no resources, but because it was too remote, too poor, too lacking in "strategic value."

This reminds me of something. While preparing this report, I searched Western mainstream media coverage of "China in Africa" over the past decade. In the top ten pages of results, the most frequent words were: ports, mines, debt, geopolitics. The word "mushroom" never appeared once.

Not because it didn't happen. But because in mushroom sheds there are no cranes, no signing ceremonies, no dams for aerial shots. The story of an old Chinese man crouching in the mud teaching farmers to grow mushrooms is not "newsworthy" enough.

Juncao technology has now been promoted to 106 countries and regions, training over 16,000 trainees from 117 countries. The United Nations calls it "a gift from China to the world." In Africa, the South Pacific, and Latin America, people call it "happiness grass," "China grass," "grass of life."

But Lin Zhanxi rarely talks about these honors. His team doesn't even have a dedicated overseas publicity department. Once, I asked his assistant: "Why don't you tell these stories to more people?" The assistant smiled wryly: "We don't even have an English website. Teacher Lin only says one thing—'Write the paper on the land.'"

In April 2024, Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Marape met with Lin Zhanxi in Guangzhou and said: "In 1997, you brought juncao technology to my country. Nearly thirty years later, it still thrives and serves my people."

Lin Zhanxi just smiled: "I'm just a mushroom grower."

A reporter pressed him: "If you could do it all over again, would you choose this path?"

He thought for a moment and said: "I don't know. But I know that without juncao, Freda might still be cutting firewood in the mountains; without juncao, my brother..."

He didn't finish.

At the Juncao Research Institute at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, there is a wall covered with photos from around the world: mushroom sheds in PNG, upland rice fields in Rwanda, demonstration centers in Fiji. Below the photos is a line written by Lin Zhanxi himself:

"Write the paper on the land, in the farmers' pockets."

But there is no photo of his brother on the wall.

Freda's farm now produces over two hundred kilograms of fresh mushrooms weekly. She plans to build another shed and hire ten more women. She says her dream is for every village in the Eastern Highlands Province to smell the aroma of mushrooms.

Lin Zhanxi is now eighty-three. He recently returned from Africa and then went to northwest China. He says the desertification along the upper reaches of the Yellow River might be addressed with juncao.

This is not a perfect story. It contains death, malaria, tribal conflict, and countless moments of wanting to give up. It also contains misunderstanding, prejudice, and the silent dedication that never makes headlines.

But it is a true story—about a Chinese old man and a wild grass that grew in a Fujian laboratory, how it crossed half the globe and took root in African soil.

Freda's farm now produces over two hundred kilograms of fresh mushrooms weekly.

Lin Zhanxi is eighty-three and still traveling for work.

This story has never appeared on the front page of any Western mainstream media outlet.

But it is happening—in the early mornings of PNG, in the afternoons of Rwanda, in countless places unseen.