In the misty mountains of East China's Fujian province, freshly picked tea leaves in late April once again move through the hands of tea makers alongside a growing wave of technological innovation.

At the Yanzike ecological tea garden in Wuyishan, a county-level city in Fujian, tea farmers speak of biodiversity, carbon sequestration and soil improvement with the same familiarity once reserved only for roasting temperatures and harvest timing. Nearby, visitors wander through tea terraces that have evolved into public leisure spaces, pausing beside streams to brew cups of Wuyi rock tea.

For Fang Zhou, a Wuyishan tea producer, who returned to his hometown in 2016 after studying big data and mathematical modeling in the United Kingdom, such scenes reflect a profound transformation underway in China's tea industry.

"Technology and tradition are not opposites. Today's technology will become tomorrow's tradition," Fang said.

That transformation has accelerated since March 2021, when President Xi Jinping visited the Yanzike tea garden during an inspection tour of Fujian.

Xi observed spring tea production and learned about ecological cultivation practices guided by local science and technology commissioners — specialists who are part of a national system that sends technical professionals to rural areas.

He urged local officials and tea producers to promote tea culture, develop the tea industry and apply technology to the sector, while also emphasizing the importance of advancing the sci-tech commissioner system, so that experts could better serve rural development.

Xi's remarks have since become an important guide for many of China's tea-producing regions, where efforts are increasingly focused not only on growing tea, but also on integrating ecological protection, technological innovation and cultural revitalization into a broader rural development strategy.

Following Xi's visit, national-level support for tea development has continued to strengthen. In September 2021, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, together with the State Administration for Market Regulation and the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, issued the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Healthy Development of the Tea Industry.

The policy outlined targets to be achieved by the end of 2025, including stabilizing tea plantation areas, boosting the contribution of science and technology to tea production, expanding processed tea output and cultivating leading enterprises.

In February 2026, five government departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, jointly issued guidelines calling for the upgrading of the entire tea industry chain and the cultivation of large-scale specialty tea industry clusters. The document set a target of expanding China's tea industry chain to 1.5 trillion yuan ($221 billion) by 2030.

Xi's connection with tea traces back to his years of working in Fujian, where he held local and provincial leadership roles, and supported the modernization and branding of Fujian's tea industry.

For Fang, the Wuyishan tea producer, Xi's remarks in 2021 helped to clarify a development path he had already begun exploring. After returning from the UK, Fang began experimenting with applying big data and intelligent systems to traditional Wuyi rock tea production. Working with research institutions, his team explored tea-picking machines, intelligent charcoal-roasting systems, and automated tea-processing technologies.

In addition to revolutionizing production, the tea gardens in the area turned into popular destinations for travelers. At the Xiqiu Dapingzhou ecological tea plantation, more than 60 hectares have been partially opened to the public free of charge. Visitors can host picnics, set up camps, read, go biking, or participate in tea-picking and tea-making experiences.

Fang sees the shift as part of a broader transition in China's tea economy, where plantations support tourism, sports, cultural events and outdoor lifestyles.

The Yanzike ecological tea garden owes its transformation largely to teams of tea researchers and sci-tech commissioners, who helped translate Xi's guidance into practice.

Among them is Xu Maoxing, a veteran tea expert from Wuyishan, who has spent more than 26 years working directly with farmers. "If farmers didn't understand new methods, we built demonstration tea gardens and showed them what the results could be," Xu said.

Under the guidance of researchers like him, Yanzike adopted green fertilization, biological pest control and intercropping systems, which together reduced pesticide use while improving biodiversity. That ecological model spread rapidly across Wuyishan. More than 9,000 hectares of such tea gardens have now been established in the area, with tea farmers' incomes soaring more than 30 percent and premium tea rates increasing 20 percent, Xu said.

In 2022, traditional tea processing techniques and associated practices in China were inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, highlighting the enduring cultural significance of tea both in China and around the world.

Shi Chengyu, president of a Beijing-based chamber of commerce dedicated to Fuding white tea, a sun-withered variety prized for its subtle elegance and long-term aging potential, calls this international recognition a reflection of the sector's dramatic evolution over the past two decades.

"In the early years, almost nobody in Beijing wanted to sell Fuding white tea, but now some aged white teas are nearly impossible to obtain due to strong demand," he said.

Shi said he believes the framework proposed by Xi for integrating the tea industry, culture and technology has fundamentally reshaped the sector. "Tea culture provides emotional identity, tea technology rebuilds trust and the tea industry creates scale," he added.