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 | Sunday, April 30, 2000, updated at 08:35(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Small Towns Have A Big Say in China's Economic DevelopmentPixian County, in southwest China 's Sichuan Province, is famous for its construction of small towns. Xipu Town in Pixian has invested more than 500 million yuan (US$ 60.24 million) in recent years in infrastructure projects.Preferential policies and better services in the town have attracted famous Chinese enterprises such as Datang Telecommunications Co. Ltd and Shenlan Air Conditioner, and some foreign big names such as Pepsi Cola. A large number of local farmers have worked in enterprises or have opened their own businesses. Xipu earns 1.8 billion yuan (US$ 217 million) in industrial output value and 50 million yuan (US$ 6 million) in revenue annually. Not far from the town, Hongguang and Wanchun towns have also developed rapidly in a number of areas including high-tech, agriculture and tourism. A large number of farmers pouring into these towns has saved large areas of land from being used for constructing houses. China has 900 million farmers. Less arable land, a large number of redundant rural laborers and low levels of intensive cultivation have hampered the development of rural economy. China hopes that through the construction of small towns, a large number of rural redundant laborers will have, thus leaving more arable land to farmers. In the long term, this will raise the income of farmers and stimulate consumption in rural areas. Small towns have mushroomed in southern Jiangsu Province and provinces of Zhejiang, Shandong and Guangdong since the mid 1980s. In east China's Zhejiang Province, for instance, rural township enterprises account for four-fifths of the province's total industrial economy. Addressing the Fourth Plenum of the 15th Communist Party of China Central Committee held in Beijing in 1999, Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, reiterated that the development of China's western regions and the construction of small towns are all key strategic issues which bear great importance on the national economic and social development. The significance of building small towns was also stressed at the 15th National Congress of the CPC and the Third Plenary Session of the 15th CPC Central Committee. Nongke Village, ten kilometers from Xipu Town, is a small village with eighty households. Local villagers have abandoned planting crops and raising pigs and started to plant flowers and entertain tourists in their village. The village now has 75 households engaged in planting flowers and tourism activities. Last year, they received 800,000 visitors. The income for local villagers exceeded 20,000 yuan (US$ 2,400). Statistics show that the urbanization rate of China reached 30. 9 percent in 1998, compared with the 11 percent in 1949 when the People's Republic of China was founded. China plans to build 4,000 small towns each with a population of over 20,000 in the next five years. At the same time, 70,000 villages will also be built to remove 50 million surplus rural laborers.
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