Xi leads China's holistic rural revitalization

"GREEN CONSENSUS" IN VILLAGES

The Yangtze River Delta serves as an important engine driving the growth of the world's second-largest economy. However, local villages once faced common "growing pains," with environmental concerns being one of them.

In 2003, Xi, then the Party chief of Zhejiang province, initiated the Green Rural Revival Program to improve the eco-environment of villages and rural residents' quality of life. The initiative has given a facelift to Zhejiang villages, including Lizu, which was once a dirty and disorderly backwater area.

In September this year, Xi made Lizu village his first stop during an inspection of Zhejiang. Surrounded by greenery, the houses with gray tiles and white walls painted a vibrant picture.

At the village market, he met Fang Tianning, a college graduate who chose to work in the countryside. Fang had put on display a variety of handmade bamboo baskets in her booth.

"I used to work in Beijing. After the Green Rural Revival Program was implemented in my village, the environment improved a lot," she told Xi. "It encouraged many university graduates to start businesses here, so I chose to return."

Over the past 20 years, the Green Rural Revival Program has been expanded nationwide and won the Champions of the Earth award in 2018, the highest environmental honor of the United Nations.

With the experience of the Green Rural Revival Program, efforts must be made to implement specific policies based on actual conditions, take steady and incremental steps to sustain progress, and achieve tangible results in the interest of the people, according to Xi's latest instructions on rural work.

China has seen historic transformations in ecological conservation, upholding the belief that "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets," a core concept of Xi's thought on ecological civilization.

Some five decades ago, when he worked in Liangjiahe village, Xi saw how the villagers struggled to feed themselves. He has aspired to secure China's food supply.

In promoting rural revitalization, the supply of major agricultural products, the supply of grain in particular, must be secured as the top priority, he noted, stressing more than once that the red line of 1.8 billion mu of farmland should never be breached.

China feeds over 1.4 billion people with only 9 percent of the world's arable land. Despite comparatively severe natural disasters and other adverse conditions, 2023 is the ninth consecutive year for the country to register a grain harvest of over 650 million tonnes.