Youngsters Return Home From City as Beautiful Chinese Village Revives
Liao Qi
DATE:  Feb 06 2018
/ SOURCE:  Yicai
Youngsters Return Home From City as Beautiful Chinese Village Revives Youngsters Return Home From City as Beautiful Chinese Village Revives

(Yicai Global) Feb. 6 -- As China embarks on a drive to revivify its countryside, ever more villages and towns are shedding their dirt and dishevelment. Peopled before by only left-behind children and the elderly, they have now started to entice company investment, young migrants back home, and an influx of tourist hordes.

Fifteen years ago, Yu Jinhong was loth to give up her high-paying accounting job to become a village official, but now, she wants to keep the job until she retires. As the party chief of Xinjian community in Dinghai district on the island of Zhoushan in southeastern Zhejiang province, Yu has witnessed a several-fold increase in local villagers' per capita income and the return of many youth who moved to other places for work.

Xinjian is an amalgamation of three villages, Yu told Yicai Global while accepting an award on behalf of her community as one of China's most beautiful villages late last year. Before the hamlets merged in 2004, locals' per capita income was well below CNY10,000, but it has now reached CNY31,800, above Zhoushan's average. "In the past, 60 percent of young people left their rural homes to take jobs in cities. Some 90 percent are back now," Yu said.

Xinjian's natural conditions are less than agriculturally ideal. Though on the sea, locals rely on farming, but depending solely on tilling the soil to get rich is hard as the area has many steep slopes with little bottom land. Yu and her team members decided to help the community develop a new rural industry model that combines culture with local economic development by leveraging its natural conditions.

Close to the shore, the local Nandong art valley has developed into a project with island features that promotes artistic creation and has become an internship center for art students across China. Yu also organized villagers to learn to paint and make paper-cuts and other handicrafts and encouraged them to sell these creations to earn more.

President Xi Jinping's visit to Xinjian community in May 2015 put the village on the map. "Before Xi's visit, we received fewer than 200,000 visitors each year. That figure topped 350,000 in 2015 after Xi came and has stayed over 350,000 in each of the past two years," Yu said.

"Per latest data from China's third census on rural tourism, some 5 percent of Chinese incorporated villages ply tourism, a rise of 2.7 percentage points from a decade ago, with about 40,000 to 50,000 natural villages also engaging in the travel business. The data amply demonstrate how tourism plays a key part in rejuvenating the countryside," Xiao Qianhui, former head of China National Tourism Administration's human resources, labor and education department and a part-time professor at Fudan University, told Yicai Global.

Village tours have become an important component of China's travel products, and revenue from this segment as a percentage of the total is set to keep growing rapidly. The leisure agriculture tour and village tour segment greeted over 2.2 billion visitors and tallied more than CNY440 billion in revenue in 2015, or 13 percent of overall domestic tourism revenue, and over CNY570 billion in 2016, for 15 percent of the total, according to Beijing-based market data provider Zhiyan Consulting Group.

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Keywords:   Country,TOURISM