It breaks a village
As millions flee to the city, hundreds of thousands of traditional Chinese villages are dying out. TOM PHILLIPS reports.
Five generations of the Qiao family have called their isolated rural village home. They came in the dying days of China’s Qing dynasty and looked on from their mountaintop perch as civil war, revolution, hunger and finally massive economic change swept the nation.
Now, however, the Qiaos’ days in Maijieping are numbered as tens of thousands of Chinese villages are driven towards extinction amid what has been dubbed the greatest human migration in history.
“The younger generations find life here too hard,” sighed 58-year-old Qiao Jinchao, who is one of only four remaining residents in a now eerily deserted village that was once home to 140. “Once they have gone out and seen more, they aren’t willing to return.”
Until 1978, when China’s reform and opening up began under Deng Xiaoping, less than 20 per cent of its population lived in cities.
But three decades of staggering economic growth and urbanization have changed all that, radically altering the face of Chinese society and condemning hundreds of thousands of rural communities, some of which have existed for hundreds of years, to the history books.
Now, China’s leaders are being urged to take urgent action to save thousands of historic villages from extinction amid reports that more than 900,000 villages were abandoned or destroyed in the first decade of this century.
“Chinese society has reached a critical moment,” warned Li Huadong, the general secretary of the China Traditional Village Protection and Development Research Centre, a recently formed group that is lobbying to protect the villages.
“If we don’t start protecting our villages now, our cities will one day be destroyed too,” he added.
Tens of millions of rural Chinese have poured into the cities since their country’s economic opening began in the late 1970s, and perhaps 250 million more will follow in their footsteps over the coming decade.
That process has brought once unthinkable wealth to impoverished farmers.
More than 500 million people have been lifted from poverty since 1978, according to World Bank figures. But it has also radically altered the Chinese countryside. The number of “traditional villages” has plummeted from 3.6 million in 2000 to 2.7 million in 2010.
Many of China’s vanishing villages have fallen victim to a frenzy of construction: swallowed up by rapidly expanding cities or knocked down to clear space for highways, industrial estates or rail links.
Last week, Chinese media published photographs of children picking their way through the rubble of Shaanxi province’s Mutazhai village after bulldozers moved in on their homes. The village, once home to thousands of residents, is to be replaced with a 2.9 million square foot “City Complex” boasting hotels, shops and a 1,148-foot tower.
Other villages have met less dramatic fates: they have simply been gradually overrun by vines and weeds after their residents left for the cities.
“It’s ironic that some villages survived thousands of years of war and disasters but have disappeared in peacetime through demolition or people’s shortterm views,” Li said.
Li, whose group was founded in June to draw attention to the disappearing communities, told The Telegraph that protecting villages was about far more than preserving “old houses and folk art.”
It was, he said, about facing up to the “spiritual and moral crisis” that China’s rush toward modernity and materialism had created.
“In our old rural society we had moral standards, ancestral halls and family discipline based on close-knit relationships. All this has been wiped out,” he said. “The DNA of our culture is in the villages. If our villages are destroyed, Chinese people will cease to be Chinese people.”
Maijieping, in the central province of Henan, now looks destined to join the growing list of villages that have slowly faded, or been wiped, from the country’s maps.
A mountaintop settlement reached by a 90-minute trek along rocky paths, the village still boasts a centuries-old well from which residents draw their water. At its peak, it was home to just 140 people.
But Maijieping is entering its twilight years: its younger generations have departed and only four residents remain. “In another 10 years we will probably have to head down (the mountain) too,” said Qiao Jinchao, a farmer who shares one of just two occupied homes in the remote village with his wife, Tan Minquan. “We won’t be able to walk so the only thing we will be able to do is to go where our children are.”
Qiao’s forefathers moved to Maijieping from a nearby village towards the end of the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 until 1912. During the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the village’s population swelled as one of Chairman Mao’s rural production teams was set up and educated “sent-down youth” began arriving from the cities to learn about the hardships of country life.
That period has been immortalized by two stone pillars that still stand at the heart of the village, emblazoned with a line from a Mao Zedong poem called The Fairy Cave: “Ineffable beauty comes at the perilous peak.”
But by the mid-’80s, Maijieping’s best days were over. As China transformed into the “factory of the world,” the exodus began.
Some residents moved or married into less remote villages, while others sought work in the nearby cities.
Now the tiny population are only kept company by a dozen chickens, four cows, two nameless dogs and three cats that are charged with catching an unknown number of rats.
A local elementary school, its roof now collapsed, has been converted into a barn. Mud brick homes that once housed members of the Qiao family have been turned into chicken coops, cow or tool sheds.
“He moved down (the mountain) in the ’90s,” said Qiao, pushing through a rickety wooden door into a roofless shack that had once been home to an uncle. A voluptuous orange cow was urinating on what had been the living-room floor.
Earlier this year, the Henan-based newspaper Oriental Today published an obituary-esque lament to the village’s imminent passing.
“Maijieping, a place which generation upon generation has called home, is not only disappearing in a cultural sense but also in a physical sense,” the newspaper wrote. The young “would rather cram into the cities than go back to their broken homes in the mountains.”
Reports about the plight of such places have prompted renewed debate about how best to protect and preserve rural traditions and customs in a rapidly changing nation. They have also brought promises of government action.
In October, senior Communist Party leaders said they were “determined” to protect “traditional and historic villages” from abandonment and demolition. Zhao Hui, director of the Ministry of Housing’s rural construction department, admitted “the vast majority of traditional villages (have) disappeared amid China’s urbanization.”
Only 12,000 villages of major historical significance were left, he said. But Beijing now planned “financial and technical” support and new laws to prevent such communities being vacated or destroyed.
Addressing European politicians and business leaders in Beijing last week, China’s premier Li Keqiang said European businesses could expect to “harvest fruit” as his government gave “200 million rural people urban jobs, homes and welfare coverage” over the next 10 years.
Li said China would promote a “new urbanization” which would “advance with respect for the willingness of rural residents and protection of their rights.”
Willing or not, many millions of Chinese villagers will continue to leave their homes in the coming years as Beijing seeks to stimulate the country’s economy by creating more and more consumption-boosting urbanites.
Today there is hardly a province in China in which major resettlements involving tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people are not underway, moving subsistence farmers from isolated hamlets like Maijieping into housing estates in more accessible areas.
In May, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said that by 2034 it expected 75 per cent of Chinese to live in cities.
Between 2010 and 2025, 300 million people — twice Russia’s population — are expected to move to urban areas.
Maijieping’s four last residents have already been asked to sign up for China’s urban revolution and construction workers are currently putting the finishing touches to a new type of “village” just a few miles away on the road to the nearby city of Yanshi.
A sign outside the incomplete housing estate vaunts a modern life of shopping malls, air-conditioned cars and boutiques that bears no resemblance to the bucolic airs of Maijieping, where food is grown not purchased and annual incomes hover around 800 yuan ($140).
“Enjoy the good city life: build a new a rural community,” reads one propaganda poster beside an artist’s impression of a sparkling six-floor government headquarters.
Qiao and his three fellow villagers have so far refused to budge from their ancestral homes but their children feel no such loyalty to the land.
“They are not coming back to live here,” he said. “Transport is bad (and) they don’t want to farm. It’s hard work and the money is not good. If you work in the cities you can earn 2,000 yuan ($350) a month.”
“It is up to our children to pass on the memories and to tell them the story of where they came from,” said Pei Huayu, 59, who shares the village’s only other occupied house with her severely disabled husband, Qiao Tao. “If they don’t, this place will be forgotten.” But nostalgia takes a back seat to pragmatism when Maijieping’s doomed locals ponders their village’s death foretold.
“What can you do? Everyone is moving down. The living conditions are better down there,” said Qiao.
“It’s natural. That’s the way it has to be. Besides, it’s getting very lonely up here.”