China Speeds Up Drive To Pave Rural Villages, Put Up High-Rises

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New high-rise apartments are under construction in villages around Heze, in eastern China’s Shandong province. Rural residents say these complexes are too expensive, too far away from their fields and ill-suited for farmers.

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«Our leaders have been distanced from us regular people at the bottom. They do not know our basic needs. They are completely cut off from us, Liu said.

Thousands of villagers in Shandong, meanwhile, have already been rendered effectively homeless since local governments began forcibly clearing away houses last year.

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Near Liu’s village, Xiguozhuang was the first village in the township of Yanshi, Shandong, to have its houses torn down. Fewer than a dozen homes remain along the village’s main road.

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About 40 residents whose houses were demolished in Hongchuancun, or Red Boat Village, now live in these plastic and tin shacks built by the local government.

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«The government does not care whether you live or die. They only care about whether you sign an agreement to let them demolish your home, said Wang Caishi, 66, a resident of Shandong’s Red Boat Village.

She and her husband, who both work as farmers and earn extra income by recycling trash, now live in tents on the edges of their fields as they wait for compensation for their destroyed house.

Demolished with good intentions

The Communist Party says it has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, many of whom have moved into cities. Bringing those gains to the 600 million residents of China’s countryside has proved difficult.

One idea that has gained traction is to relocate villagers into denser communities, reducing the fragmentation of agricultural plots that has stymied commercial farming and rural development.

«Rural consolidation has been going on kind of rapidly in many parts of China for at least a decade, said Alexander Day, an associate professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles who studies Chinese rural policy. «The intent is to pull these people out of very small villages and put them into these new, concentrated communities. It also allows for the development of land.

In the early 2000s, provinces also rolled out plans to revamp village infrastructure, social services and agricultural technology. Sanitation improved in many villages. New roads were built. Average incomes rose.

Rural policies initially aimed to upgrade roads and farming techniques. But they quickly morphed into all-out campaigns to relocate villagers.

«In practice and implementation, it’s all become about housing, said Kristen Looney, an associate professor at Georgetown University who researches Asian rural development.

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Homes under construction that villagers in Xiguozhuang and Liushuanglou are being asked to buy and move into. The houses are aesthetically pleasing, says Liu, but they are incompatible with the rural lifestyle. For example, farmers require a large yard to dry their crops after harvest each season.

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«The construction of houses themselves generates spending. And once people move into homes, they have to buy durable goods to fill those homes and they become these new kinds of consumers, she said.

In the process of transplanting villages en masse, local governments also accrue a valuable resource: the land underneath those villages.

By moving villagers from sprawling farmhouses into smaller apartments in multistory buildings, local governments can consolidate land and sell it at a high margin to commercial property developers. The profits also incentivize land grabs from villagers. «That is why land is such a contentious issue in China and probably the number one source of state-society conflict in the country, Looney said.

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This year, the Shandong city of Liaocheng wants to merge 6,260 villages into 1,000 larger communities. The vacated land relinquished by rural residents, will in turn be contracted for third-party commercial use, such as agritourism and pig farming. Qingdao, a major port city in Shandong that sits by the Yellow Sea, also announced in January that more than 500 surrounding villages will be taken down.

Selling land is a major revenue source for nearly all Chinese local governments. Cash-strapped and often heavily indebted from construction projects, local governments reached a record volume of land sales last year as China’s economic growth began to slow.

But by «fantasizing about the riches that land development brings, He Xuefeng, an expert on rural China who teaches at Wuhan University, wrote last month, lower-level government officials «cannot help but scheme about how to take rural land from villagers, thus bringing about an unnecessary ordeal to both the countryside and its residents.

«Torn down without permission

Among corn fields at the edge of city of Heze, Hongchuancun or Red Boat Village sits on about 5,000 acres to be razed this year to make way for concrete apartment complexes. Hundreds of homes have already been torn down.

In late June, area residents thought they had been spared when the provincial government forbade demolition without consent, following heavy criticism.

But the destruction has accelerated, according to more than two dozen villagers who spoke to NPR.

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Construction cranes moved into Red Boat Village, despite a Shandong provincial government ban on forcible demolition in late June.

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One of the tin shacks that Red Boat Villagers now live in after their houses were bulldozed.

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One of the tin shacks that Red Boat Villagers now live in after their houses were bulldozed.

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County and village officials defended the price differential to NPR, saying the new houses were being sold at a break-even cost to cover construction materials and labor.

About 40 of Red Boat Village’s residents now live in rows of corrugated tin shacks — housing provided by the state to those whose homes are now gone. Several residents had built rudimentary mud and straw huts on the edge of their fields after their brick houses were torn down this spring.

«I cannot afford to buy a new apartment, even if it is built, so I can only live in such a [mud] house, said one woman, who declined to give her name. «If the government knows I am criticizing them, they might take away this house too.

Amy Cheng contributed research.