SHIJIAZHUANG, Dec. 12 -- Pang Zhankui never expected he and his family could have a flush toilet at home, which finally enabled them to get rid of the latrine pit haunted by flies and mosquitos.

"No more dirty pits and no more stinky smells. All we have to do is push the flush button," said Pang, a 65-year-old farmer in Cangfang Village, Gaoyi County in north China's Hebei Province.

Pang's family is among the 120,000 households who had their pit toilets replaced by flush toilets this year as part of a provincial campaign echoing a national call to improve the living environment in rural areas.

China has a rural population of 650 million. Farmers have benefited from the country's opening up, reform, and preferential policies in past decades, which have allowed them to feed themselves and have their health insurance covered. They enjoy almost the same advanced home appliances as urban people do in their daily lives.

However, the living environment in rural areas still lags behind that of cities.

Farmers suffer from dirty pit toilets, garbage and waste water near their houses because of poor infrastructure and loose management in rural areas.

"We used to throw kitchen leftovers and other garbage into the pigsty in the yard, but in recent years, when we quit raising pigs, we had nowhere to discard the garbage," said Feng Yuezeng, a farmer from the Nanlangtou Village of Luancheng County, Shijiazhuang City.

In a rural environment improvement campaign, the Hebei provincial government spent 6.57 billion yuan (1.08 billion U.S. dollars) this year on garbage disposal in 50,000 villages in the province. More than 120,000 workers have been hired at an annual cost of 270 million yuan to collect the trash in villages and deliver it to garbage power plants nearby.

According to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture, annual household garbage in the country's rural areas has reached 300 million tonnes, with 94 percent of its 60 million tonnes of waste water discharged haphazardly

At the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held in November 2012, the CPC aimed to build a "moderately prosperous society" by 2020, featuring sustained and sound economic development, expanded democracy, improved soft power, and increased living standards and environment.

In October this year, President Xi Jinping called on local governments to learn from Zhejiang Province to improve living conditions in rural areas.

Zhejiang, located on China's eastern coast, launched a project in 2003 to renovate houses and living facilities in the countryside, improve rural design and planning, and enhance the rural ecological and human environment.

Zhang Baoqiang, director with the leadership office on countryside appearance innovation in Hebei, said the unfavorable living environment in rural areas is an extreme weak point in realizing the prosperity goal.

Zhang said that with the increasing awareness of farmers toward their living conditions, more government efforts need to be taken to address rural environmental issues.

He said that next year the government will select another 3,000 villages to be included in the campaign, and it plans to convert all pit toilets to flush toilets in the province within three years.

"We now only have seven years to reach the goal. Time is very pressing," Zhang said.