More Chinese villages continue to vanish as urbanization rapidly rises. (Photo : Reuters)
At a recent national conference, novelist Feng Jicai of Tianjin revealed that over the past decade, roughly 90,000 Chinese villages have already disappeared, the China Youth Daily reported.
A recent survey of the paper also shows that 85.9 percent of its 2001 respondents thought that there is a decline in the number of villages in their areas and over 50 percent stated that this is because of the changes in the villagers' and farmers' socio-economic status.
Of the 85.9 percent, 64.8 percent attributed this trend to the moving of young people from rural to urban areas, 64.4 percent said it was because of the decline in the number of farmers, while 52.7 percent said it was because of the increasing populace of students attending schools in urban areas.
Other factors cited by the respondents included deserted farms (mentioned by 42.6 percent of the respondents), diminishing number of new buildings in the rural areas (34.1 percent), and the increasing migration of the population from rural to urban regions (34.1 percent).
The respondents were composed of 57 percent urban residents and 43 percent rural residents.
The recent poll also showed that much of the worries of the rural dwellers go to the destruction of the family structure in their areas. Concerns over the welfare of the older people and the children in the rural areas were also cited.
According to Lu Huilin, an associate professor with the Department of Sociology in Peking University, Chinese villages vanish because of two reasons: They are either destroyed by external forces (for example, mergers between villages), or by the lack of transportation access and public infrastructure.
Current data show that around 54 percent of China's population live in cities, a 42.5-percent increase from the 2005 statistic.
The growth of the urban population in China is regarded as faster than in any other nation.
