How China’s traditional villages are falling victim to its global ambitions
- Photojournalist Wang Xiaoyan’s pictures of a vanishing settlement in Shanxi’s Taihang mountains reflect the fate of thousands of similar villages in China
- Intangible cultural heritage assets are being lost in the relentless pursuit of economic growth
Cobbled onto the side of a hill in the arid Taihang mountain range of landlocked Shanxi province, Dapin is one among tens of thousands of villages that are disappearing amid China’s rise as a global economic powerhouse.
“China has a 5,000-year farming history,” says photojournalist Wang Xiaoyan. “The village is the most basic unit of a Chinese society. Most of us have rural village roots.”
Wang has visited more than 100 traditional – or “ziran”, “natural” – villages across 10 provinces to photograph a rural population that has seen 300 million people abandon agrarian life for work in the cities.
“The exodus began in the 1990s,” he says. By then, “the average monthly salary in a city was what a farmer might earn in a year”.
By 2012, the government had earmarked 20 billion yuan (HK$22 billion) to create a list of traditional villages. Any village that could show it possessed the requisite intangible cultural heritage of social or economic valueand that more than 60 per cent of its structures were built before 1949would be issued a one-off lump sum of three million yuan for conservation efforts.
