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Zhang Baogen insists on calling himself a peasant farmer and hesitates to take off his shoes before entering his old neighbor's trendy sitting room with its polished flooring.

 

The village in Zhejiang Province, where he has spent almost all his past 62 years, is now called "New Weizhang Community" as the Shaoxing County to which it belongs evolves into a boom town.

 

"I used to feed on rice and fresh vegetable that grew in my own fields, but now I have to shop for groceries like city dwellers," said Zhang. "What's a world of difference now between urban and rural lives?"

 

Under a massive redevelopment program, cropland and rural houses in the community have given way for urban facilities: garden villas, public green spaces, grocery stores and the largest wholesale market for light industrial products in Asia, where many local residents do business.

 

Zhang agrees that today's life is quite easy and comfortable. "I don't have to toil in the fields from dawn to dusk. The 220 yuan (about US$26.5) monthly pension is enough for my basic necessities."

 

The family now lives in one of the 471 three-story garden villas the township government has built for locals, nicely furnished with household appliances and all comparable to the average urban household.

 

Urbanization in the affluent eastern province has been cutting into its rural population by 500,000 annually since the late 1990s. For a time, it was considered the best remedy for rural poverty, widening urban-rural gap and a host of other problems confronting the country's rural areas.

 

But it is out of the question to turn every rural community urban and every farmer urbanite in China, whose rural population makes up more than 60 percent of the 1.3 population.

 

Statistics provided by the provincial government indicate that in 2004 alone, Zhejiang set up 1,000 exemplary communities and renovated 4,500 villages to improve rural environment. About 16.47 million square meters of old houses were demolished and replaced with 18.19 million square meters of modern housing.

 

Prior to the Chinese Lunar New Year on January 29, thousands of rural families had bid good-bye to their shabby, trash-ridden village homes and moved into new communities.

 

Experts say the Chinese government, aiming to build a harmonious society, must incorporate its 900 million farmers into the social security system, which is a premise for social stability and can help prompt the country's advance from an agriculture country to an industrialized nation.

 

(Xinhua News Agency February 13, 2006)