DAI SAID THAT THE GOVERNMENT INTENDS TO MOVE GRAVES ONTO THE MAINLAND TO REASSURE SUPERSTITIOUS TOURISTS
school. But now, at 40, I can sit indoors and make good money. Not bad, right?” he chuckles, tallying up the income from China’s “Golden Week” holiday in October.
Chen Xuecheng (no direct relation to Ms. Chen), a 23-year-old Xiaonuo native who works at Lindo Art Space, scurries about helping carry visitors’ suitcases to the gate, taking coffee orders, and showing guests to their rooms.
“My parents won’t let me go into fishing. They say the work is too hard, and too dangerous,” he notes. He had considered following a cousin to work in an air-conditioner factory in Wuhan, but when the job at Lindo opened up, he chose to stay at home.
Although paint instantly transformed Xiaonuo into Rainbow Village from the outside-in, the coming years may change it from the inside-out.
At night, the family converges in the Great Wave Seafood House for a late meal as Ms. Chen’s husband, also surnamed Chen, closes up shop. He gripes of how the Dais allegedly paid one family in Xiaonuo double what they negotiated with others for the lease of their land. Mr. Chen says the deal has created acrimony among villagers.
The newcomers have their own gripes. “Out here it’s pretty, but it’s not well-planned,” Dai Hong tells TWOC, citing kilometers-long traffic jams on holidays and a dearth of public seating areas in the village. As to her leases, she notes that there was no standard price for renting out land in the area, so she only paid as much as the residents were willing to offer.
With the local government planning to install a sea viewing terrace, and connect more roads to the village, Dai dreams of a time when the village is filled with artist studios and wedding venues—“a kind of utopia, where you can come and forget all your worries.” Dai said that the government intends to help move some sea-facing graves onto the mainland to reassure superstitious tourists, though Mr. Chen, alarmed, says he hasn’t heard of any such plans.
In the parking lot, a Taizhou city government worker on his third visit to Xiaonuo for work mourns over the changes to the community. “Before, when we did work here, there was no cheating or scamming,” he says. “Now people start to think of all kinds of ways to make a buck. The local fishing people’s lives are no longer simple or pure.”
Between the nostalgic who wish for the countryside to remain pastoral and unchanged, and those who want rural areas to rush down the same paths of development as cities, scholar Yang Guiqing seeks middle ground. “We cannot equate rural modernization with rural urbanization,” the urban planning professor at Tongji University said in a 2018 interview with People.cn, advocating instead for “organic renewals” in which “villagers can participate and share benefits.”
“I don’t hope this island will be overdeveloped, but it needs fresh blood. If your planning is not welldone, you may as well not develop it,” mused Dai. “You’ll not only waste a space, but ruin it.”