Strolling in Pantang village, visitors will be surprised at its cleanliness, a sharp contrast to the garbage-smothered conditions in most of the countryside.

Liu Bixiang, a 52-year-old farmer, is one of Pantang's street cleaners.

It's a small village in Yiwu City, Zhejiang Province. Her job, which is still novel in rural areas, is to keep the village clean by emptying wastebins in front of each household.

"I get 700 yuan (US$84) a month by working six to seven hours a day," Liu said. "As a cleaner, I can make more money here than in the cities. The salary is similar but I have to spend more money in the cities."

Professor Huang Yiwei with the Zhejiang Institute of Environmental Science said littering is ingrained behavior.

"Littering has been a bad habit for thousands of years in rural areas," Huang said. "Usually you can see garbage piling at the foot of a mountain or by the riverside."

More than 1,000 street cleaners like Liu in the rural areas of Yiwu or about 10,000 in Zhejiang's countryside now collect and dispose trash.

The trash is first transferred to a refuse collection station and then to a refuse treatment plant in the county for incineration or sent to a landfill.

Traditionally seen as underdeveloped and self-sufficient, China's rural areas have now begun to enjoy some of the services once seen as exclusively for cities.

The country is committed to building "new rural areas" in the next five years in a bid to improve the living standards of farmers.

(Xinhua News Agency October 28, 2005)