Zhang Baogen insists on calling himself a peasant farmer and
hesitates to take off his shoes before entering his old neighbor's
trendy sitting room with its polished flooring.
The village in
Zhejiang Province, where he has spent almost all his past 62
years, is now called "New Weizhang Community" as the Shaoxing
County to which it belongs evolves into a boom town.
"I used to feed on rice and fresh vegetable that grew in my own
fields, but now I have to shop for groceries like city dwellers,"
said Zhang. "What's a world of difference now between urban and
rural lives?"
Under a massive redevelopment program, cropland and rural houses
in the community have given way for urban facilities: garden
villas, public green spaces, grocery stores and the largest
wholesale market for light industrial products in Asia, where many
local residents do business.
Zhang agrees that today's life is quite easy and comfortable. "I
don't have to toil in the fields from dawn to dusk. The 220 yuan
(about US$26.5) monthly pension is enough for my basic
necessities."
The family now lives in one of the 471 three-story garden villas
the township government has built for locals, nicely furnished with
household appliances and all comparable to the average urban
household.
Urbanization in the affluent eastern province has been cutting
into its rural population by 500,000 annually since the late 1990s.
For a time, it was considered the best remedy for rural poverty,
widening urban-rural gap and a host of other problems confronting
the country's rural areas.
But it is out of the question to turn every rural community
urban and every farmer urbanite in China, whose rural population
makes up more than 60 percent of the 1.3 population.
Statistics provided by the provincial government indicate that
in 2004 alone, Zhejiang set up 1,000 exemplary communities and
renovated 4,500 villages to improve rural environment. About 16.47
million square meters of old houses were demolished and replaced
with 18.19 million square meters of modern housing.
Prior to the
Chinese Lunar New Year on January 29, thousands of rural
families had bid good-bye to their shabby, trash-ridden village
homes and moved into new communities.
Experts say the Chinese government, aiming to build a harmonious
society, must incorporate its 900 million farmers into the social
security system, which is a premise for social stability and can
help prompt the country's advance from an agriculture country to an
industrialized nation.
(Xinhua News Agency February 13, 2006)