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China's villages vanish amid rush for the cities

By Tom Phillips, Maijieping village,Henan province

23 Nov 2013

 

Five generations of the Qiao family have called thisisolated rural village home. They came in the dying days of China's Qingdynasty 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 arenumbered as tens of thousands of Chinese villages are driven towards extinctionamid what has been dubbed the greatest human migration in history.

 

"The younger generations find life here toohard," sighed 58-year-old Qiao Jinchao, who is one of only four remainingresidents 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 beganunder Deng Xiaoping, less than 20 per cent of its population lived in cities. Butthree decades of staggering economic growth and urbanization have changed allthat, radically altering the face of Chinese society and condemning hundreds ofthousands of rural communities, some of which have existed for hundreds ofyears, to the history books.

 

Now, China's leaders are being urged to take urgentaction to save thousands of historic villages from extinction amid reports thatmore than 900,000 villages were abandoned or destroyed in the first decade ofthis century.

 

Tens of millions of rural Chinese have poured into thecities since their country's economic opening began in the late 1970s andperhaps 250 million more will follow in their footsteps over the coming decade.

 

Many of China's vanishing villages have fallen victimto a frenzy of construction: swallowed up by rapidly expanding cities orknocked down to clear space for motorways, industrial estates or rail links.

Some villages have met less dramatic fates: they havesimply been gradually overrun by vines and weeds after their residents left forthe cities never to return.

 

"It's ironic that some villages survivedthousands of years of war and disasters but have disappeared in peacetimethrough demolition or people's short-term views," Prof Li Huadong from theChina Traditional Village Protection and Development Research Centre said in aninterview with state media. He told The Telegraph protecting Chinese villageswas 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 andmaterialism had created.

 

"In our old rural society we had moral standards,ancestral halls and family discipline based on close-knit relationships. Allthis has been wiped out," he said. "The DNA of our culture is in thevillages. If our villages are destroyed, Chinese people will cease to beChinese people."

 

Maijieping, around 31 miles from the city of Luoyangin the central province of Henan, now looks destined to join the constantlygrowing list of Chinese villages that have slowly faded, or been wiped, fromthe country's maps. Its younger generations have departed and only fourresidents remain.

 

"In another 10 years we will probably have tohead down [the mountain] too," said Qiao Jinchao, a local farmer whoshares one of just two occupied homes in the remote village with his wife TanMinquan. "We won't be able to walk so the only thing we will be able to dois to go where our children are."

 

Mr Qiao's forefathers moved to Maijieping from anothernearby village towards the end of the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644until 1911. 

During the 1950s, sixties and seventies the village'spopulation swelled as one of Chairman Mao's rural production teams was set upand educated "sent-down youth" began arriving from the cities tolearn about the hardships of country life.

 

But by the mid-1980s Maijieping's best days were over.As China transformed into the "factory of the world" and millions setoff for the cities, the exodus began. Some residents moved or married into lessremote villages while others sought work in the nearby cities of Zhengzhou orLuoyang. 

 

From a peak of 140 the human population has sinceplummeted to just four. They are kept company by a dozen chicken, four cows,two nameless dogs and three cats that are charged with catching an unknownnumber of rats.

 

Earlier this year, the Henan-based newspaper OrientalToday published an obituary-esque lament to the village's imminent passing. "Maijieping,a place which generation upon generation has called home, is not onlydisappearing in a cultural sense but also in a physical sense," thenewspaper wrote. The young "would rather cram into the cities than go backto their broken homes in the mountains." Reports about the plight ofplaces such as Maijieping have prompted renewed debate about how best toprotect 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 theywere "determined" to protect "traditional and historicvillages" from abandonment and demolition. Zhao Hui, director of the Ministryof Housing's rural construction department, admitted "the vast majority oftraditional villages [have] disappeared amid China's urbanization". Only12,000 villages of major historical significance were left, he said.

 

But Beijing now planned "financial andtechnical" support and new laws to prevent such communities being vacatedor destroyed.

 

China's premier Li Keqiang said this week China wouldpromote a "new urbanization" which would "advance with respectfor the willingness of rural residents and protection of their rights."Willing or not, many millions of Chinese villagers will continue to leave theirhomes in the coming years as Beijing seeks to stimulate the country's economyby creating more and more consumption-boosting urbanites.

 

In May, China's National Bureau of Statistics saidthat by 2034 it expected 75 per cent of Chinese to live in cities. Between 2010and 2025, 300 million people – more than twice Russia's current population –are expected to move to urban areas.

 

Maijieping's four last residents have already beenasked to sign up for China's urban revolution and construction workers arecurrently 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 amodern life of shopping malls, air-conditioned cars and clothes boutiques thatbears no resemblance to the bucolic airs of Maijieping, where food is grown notpurchased and annual incomes hover around 800 yuan (£81).

 

"Enjoy the good city life: build a new ruralcommunity," reads one propaganda poster.

 

Mr Qiao and his three fellow villagers have so farrefused to budge from their ancestral homes but their children feel no suchloyalty to the land.

 

"They are not coming back to live here," hesaid. "Transport is bad [and] they don't want to farm. It's hard work andthe money is not good. If you work in the cities you can earn 2,000 yuan (£202)a month." "It is up to our children to pass on the memories and totell them the story of where they came from," said Pei Huayu, 59, whoshares the village's only other occupied house with her severely disabledhusband, Qiao Tao. "If they don't, this place will be forgotten." Butnostalgia takes a back seat to pragmatism when Maijieping's doomed localsponders their village's death foretold.

 

"What can you do? Everyone is moving down. Theliving conditions are better down there," said Mr Qiao."It's natural.That's the way it has to be. Besides, it's getting very lonely up here."