Ghost villages dot China after great trek to cities
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 mountain-top 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,” said 58-year-old Qiao Jinchao, who is one of only four remaining residents in a now eerily deserted village. “Once they have gone out and seen more, they aren’t willing to return.”
Until 1978, when China’s reform began under Deng Xiaoping, less than 20% of its population lived in cities. But 30 years of staggering economic growth and urbanisation have changed all that.
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 10 years of this century.
“Chinese society has reached a critical moment,” warned Professor Li Huadong, 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.”
Tens of millions of rural Chinese have poured into the cities since their country’s government relaxed its strict economic policies, starting in the late 1970s, and perhaps 250 million more will follow in their footsteps in the next 10 years.
The number of “traditional villages” has plummeted from 3.6 million in 2000 to 2.7 million in 2010.
Many villages have been flattened to make way for shopping centres, new roads and rapidly expanding cities.
Other villages have met less dramatic fates: they have simply been gradually overrun by vines and weeds after their residents left for the cities.
Li, whose group was founded in June to draw attention to the disappearing communities, said 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 towards 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.” — © The Sunday Telegraph, London