Rural renewal paying off
A government push for rural revitalization is paying dividends as villages thrive economically and find a new sense of pride
Before they began building a public hall in the village of Wang, in Zhejiang province, the village enjoyed ties to fame that many of its inhabitants were utterly ignorant of.
The name of the building, Wang Jing Memorial Hall, begins to tell the story. Many of the inhabitants of the village of Wang share their name, China’s most common family name, with it, and many of those inhabitants have lineage to Wang Jing, whose name graces the hall.
Wang Jing lived about 600 years ago and was an influential scholar of the day. In fact he was the chief editor of the Yongle Encyclopedia, which with its 11,000 books was the world’s largest paper-based encyclopedia. Only about 400 books have survived.
Opposite the memorial hall is a newly renovated ancestral temple. Money to cover the upgrading was donated by households in Wang village, which is much like more than 400 villages in Songyang county, which has been an agrarian society for hundreds of years, its fortunes circumscribed by its poor transport, which means it takes about four hours by road to get to the provincial capital, Hangzhou, 280 kilometers to the north.
Wang Genshui, 55, the village head, says that when the memorial hall opened in February the newfound pride by locals in their village’s history was palpable. In fact a ceremony at the hall to commemorate their ancestors drew people not only from the village but many who had long since left to work in other places.
“It has brought people together and is encouraging them to revitalize the village’s cultural traditions,” Wang says, adding that in finding a shared famous ancestor long-standing feuds and disputes had even been defused.
Apart from functioning as a modern ancestral temple, the memorial hall is also an open community center for the village, where dogs come and go, and where people can organize activities such as holding wedding banquets.
The memorial hall is made of rammed earth with a cement roof, and all this is perfectly suited to Wang village, where buildings are similarly made.
Construction of the hall has been like finding a missing link, allowing the village to maintain its integrity, says Xu Tiantian, who designed the memorial hall.
The Beijing architect has designed 20 public buildings, including museums, a bridge, a theater and factories, in various parts of Songyang.
Rural development has gained ever growing support from the central government since President Xi Jinping listed rural vitalization as a priority on the government’s top agenda at the 19th CPC National Congress last year.
Architects such as Xu see it as a good opportunity to take part in social change by changing the way they do things.
Rural architecture need not be eyecatching, she says. The important thing is that it changes people’s lives.
A factory in the village of Xing that makes brown sugar, and which Xu designed, has drawn many plaudits for her from locals. When the factory opened in 2016 people replaced tea trees with sugar cane to produce brown sugar, a traditional skill passed on for generations. For villagers, brown sugar has supplanted tea as the main source of income because of brown sugar’s rising price.
Wang Weixing recalls that in his childhood brown sugar was something people made at home, and the environment for making it was not particularly clean or hygienic, he says.
The new factory is laid out in such a way that visitors can get a taste of how brown sugar is made and experience the village’s sugar culture. Once sugar cane is harvested in autumn, brown sugar production begins, a process that takes place in November to December, and this attracts many tourists keen on see how the product is made.
Every village needs to find something special from its history and culture as it goes about revitalizing itself.”
Wang Jun, Party chief of Songyang county
The transparent factory has a circular corridor that allows visitors to watch the entire sugar-making process, and this in effect puts the workers on stage. They wear clean orange uniforms and treat their work like a kind of performance, says Wang, 52, who is in charge of the factory.
“At first they were bashful, but now they have taken it in their stride and are confident in going about their duties as visitors from far and wide look on.”
When sugar is not being made, the factory becomes a community center, a public space in which villagers can enjoy square dancing, a popular pastime in China, watch films, and hold meetings and exhibitions.
In a traditional rural village there has generally been no community center, and ancestral temples have acted as a kind of public space. However, as people embrace modern lifestyles, villages have increasingly needed such public space, Xu says. Thus most of the rural buildings she has designed have a communications function, she says.
In contrast to Xu devoting herself to public buildings in Songyang, another architect, Shen Junming, specializes in converting village houses into homestay hotels and running them himself.
He quit his job in Hangzhou in 2015 and went to Xikeng, 250 kilometers away, to build his own hotel. Xikeng is a small village on a hill facing a big valley known for its picturesque scenery. However, most villagers have left Xikeng because of its poor transport, leaving the village almost empty. Even now there are fewer than 30 regular residents though tourism is thriving.
Most houses were built out of rammed earth in the 1940s, and many are on the verge of collapse.
Shen says that when he came across Xikeng two years ago he rented a house whose owner planned to demolish it. Shen kept the walls of the house so that it harmonized with other cottages in the village and redesigned it into a modern homestay hotel with several rooms.
“If you want to see clouds floating in the valley, it is the perfect place,” Shen says. “More and more visitors are coming here, and many people, including locals, are getting into the hospitality business.”
Beautiful scenery aside, Shen is keen for tourists to Xikeng to experience local culture, too. He is building a market space for farmers to sell locally grown food and helps organize activities with locals such as making local cuisine and putting on a dragon dance during Spring Festival.
“Xikeng has not put on a dragon dance for 17 years,” Shen says. “It’s clear that the village is recapturing its lost vitality.”
Shen has also become keenly aware of the changes that are underway. He himself is learning from the villagers how to live a rural life, and he is also picking up traditional house building skills.
One example of local customs is that from March to April all local workers in his hotel stop work, returning home to pick tea leaves.
“These villages will not disappear,” Shen says. “It’s just that the line between city and country is increasingly obscure. Countryside is just a concept of distance compared with cities.”
With more and more people like Shen from big cities flowing into Songyang to help it grow, the question arises of whom rural development is meant to serve.
Wang Jun, Party chief of Songyang county, says that local residents should be the main beneficiaries. No matter who wishes to engage in rural revitalization, locals need to be encouraged to take part in building their own villages, he says.
One serious problem for those wishing to promote rural development is how to attract young people return to the countryside. Wang says that this is why he invites architects to build factories producing local foods such as bean curd and rice wine made by drawing on traditional skills.
Wang Jun has devoted six years to rural development, including repairing very old houses, promoting traditional farming and raising funds for public buildings in villages.
Creating the buildings, either renovated or newly built, has been relatively cheap, he says. A theater built of bamboo in a bamboo forest near Hengkeng village cost less than 200,000 yuan ($31,380).
Millions of yuan spent on revitalizing villages can be millions wasted, Wang says, because ultimately it is not building that matter, but the use to which they are put and the changes that they generate.
“Every village needs to find something special from its history and culture as it goes about revitalizing itself. Rural vitalization can’t be achieved in just a year or two; it’s something that takes a very long time.”