BY LI RUIJIE

Shanshui Xincun

  Lao Zhang was a retired construction worker in Hohhot, capital of north China's Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. The old man had worked to build apartment buildings all his life but never expected, even in a dream, to be able to set his home in one of them.

  Now Lao Zhang has moved into an apartment building with shiny, broad French windows that stands just where his shabby village, once sandwiched among the city's high rises, used to lie.

  Lao Zhang and his wife live in a two-bedroom apartment in what is now Shanshui Xincun, a new residential community that occupies the place of his former Mahuaban Village, where dilapidated bungalows sprawled and streets were tainted by stenching rubbish and waste water.

  Some 50 apartment buildings have risen in Shanshui Xincun, where Lao Zhang and his wife and their 800 fellow villagers enjoy the beautiful scenery of colorful gardens and dustless streets.

  And the apartment block has almost everything its high-priced neighborhood communities may boast: a large stretch of greenbelts and gardens, which occupy about 40 percent of its area, the round-the-clock security service offered by more than 100 guards and 36 real-time video monitors, commercial services and kindergartens, among other facilities and services. 

  "When I was a construction worker, each time we completed a project, we simply moved to another construction site, and never for a second had I had an idea to live in such a beautiful building,"says Lao Zhang.

  What has pushed the change of Lao Zhang's village is Hohhot's urbanization efforts, and Mahuaban is only one of the many villages that have been replaced by new scenes.

  Since 2000, the city proper of Hohhot has expanded from 80 to 159 square kilometers. Most new urban areas are what once was called cheng zhong cun, or literally in English, villages amid the city.

  Actually, cheng zhong cun usually refers to villages on the edge of a city or the joint between urban and rural areas, which are adjacent to or enclosed by urban communities but was once forgotten in past urban development plannings. The existence of such enclaves is believed to be a bottleneck of urbanization that troubles most Chinese cities.

  Hohhot has stepped up efforts to cover more cheng zhong cun into its urbanization planning since 2005 to turn the patches on the cityscape a seamless extension. The city has planned to reshape 76 such villages, according to its urban construction map that covers a scope of 250 square kilometers and 100,000 rural populations. Now it has completed and is rebuilding 37 of them.

Children are playing at Shanshui Xincun.

New "villages"

Most of the new settlements are located along the newly-built Erhuanlu Road, or the Second Loop Road, which is accompanied by a parallel greenbelt. The beautiful new buildings in various colors look like pearls that dot the green necklace of the city.

  Some of the new residential communities are still named villages, like Lao Zhang's Shanshui Xincun, which literally means "landscape new village." And others have more citified names such as "Oceanic City." But whatever names they might take, they are all garden-like abodes in real sense.

  Ecological and environmental concerns were taken into consideration when city construction planners mapped the blueprint.

  The former Dakulun Village had a large area of salina and a lot of large ponds. So the municipal government decided to rebuild the village into a wetland park. Now, after two years' construction, a park that occupies more than 600 hectares of land has taken shape and become a new resort for local residents.

  In addition to residential buildings, cultural facilities and venues are also rising in the places of former villages, becoming new attractions of Hohhot, dubbed the paradise on the grassland.

  Lao Zhang's former home, Mahuaban Village, has become a new landmark of Hohhot for its street landscape that features the Mongolian culture. The street now is home to the new autonomous regional gymnasium, the city's stadium, and the Genghis Khan Square.

Break the Bottleneck

Reshaping cheng zhong cun is generally regarded as a thorny issue as villagers'compensation demand for the loss of land, their employment and social welfare arrangement are all challenges the government must tackle.

  "It is actually a process of reallocation of profits. So we put farmers?interests first when we made policies to resettle them, ensuring that they suffer no infringement of interests after losing land," says Han Zhiran, secretary of the Hohhot Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China.

  The government offered two alternatives: the construction project could be undertaken either by the village or by a developer, but it demanded that villagers be offered low-priced houses whichever choice was made.

  As a pilot project, Mahuaban Village decided to undertake the construction itself. The government exempted all the taxes and fees of the project, and villagers bought their apartments at 700-860 yuan (100-123 US dollars) per square meter, about one third of the market price.

  Averagely, each family got two sets of 60-sq-meter apartments in the new Shanshui Xincun community, according to Cheng Lin, a village official of Mahuaban. He says now villagers can earn rent with an extra set of apartment.

  Liu Yan, a resident in Fuxing Garden community, says her three-people family used to live in a two-room bungalow. She got 200,000 yuan compensation after her Fuxingying Village was rebuilt. She bought a 78-sq-meter apartment with only more than 50,000 yuan. Now she plans to buy a shop front for renting.

  In addition to rents, people can earn more as shareholders of collective enterprises set up by their former villages. Taohaoban Village is building 100,000 square meters of shops and a hotel. Former villagers are all shareholders of the two businesses, ensuring they can have a fixed income after losing land.

  People from former Shanshui Village can work at village enterprises after vocational training. The village has set up four enterprises and runs a hotel, with a fixed asset of 100 million yuan, according to village head Wang Jiurun.

  The labor department also offers vocational training to the new citizens. To provide more work opportunities, the government has opened a series of markets near the Second Loop Road, which is adjacent to the new communities.

  Besides employment, social security is another major concern of the former farmers. In 2005, the municipal government issued a policy to cover all landless farmers by endowment insurance. By the end of March, more than 17,000 former farmers from 18 villages had been put under the umbrella.

  Jia Genxi, 70, and his wife can now get 836 yuan of pension every month. "It is really a cozy life to live in such a comfortable apartment with the money," says the old man from Fuxingying Village.

  According to Feng Zhihong, an official in charge of the resettlement project, medicare insurance is also accessible to the new citizens, and the needy ones can get allowances.

  The government also strengthened supervision and transparency to check possible corruption and infringement of people's interests, such as cutting and encroaching compensation, says Feng.