Most of the search results involved tourist agencies in Nanjing and Shanghai who were advertising the theme park by means of a detailed tourist itinerary. Second, I found a limited number of advertisements for the sale of resettlement houses in the Jinhu New Village. Third, I found accounts from urbanites who had traveled to Jinhu and were commenting on their experiences at the theme park. Most of them seem to have enjoyed themselves and left only very short comments. Last but not least, I encountered one informed and detailed online report by a local resident—entitled “Jinhu New Countryside is a Gambling Game and a Fraud”. Although I have used the internet as an extra source to understand what is going on at the Jinhu site, it is worth noting that the internet has also served as an important arena used by actors involved with Jinhu to gain legitimacy, to voice complaints, to vent anger, and to advertise for economic profit. Jinhu New Village is located in southern Anhui Province about 30 kilometers south of Wuhu City. Altogether it occupies an area of 189 hectares , on a stretch of land running along the east side of the national road G205. G205 is a two-lane paved road built before China’s highway construction boom of the last ten years. The site is situated on a broad plain traversed by numerous canals and lakes. These lakes are the reason why this area would also be chosen as the site for a theme park. Given the relatively high average temperatures and annual precipitation, two harvests are possible each year . The rich agricultural fields in the Jinhu new countryside construction zone once supported twelve traditional villages . Residents of these villages have now all been relocated to Jinhu New Village on the southwest corner of the development zone. Both the Jinhu New Village and the associated theme park are separated from the national G205 road by a stretch of landscaping composed of a long canal, green lawns, and willow trees. As with many New Countryside projects now under construction in China—projects often readily visible to drivers rushing along the gleaming new freeways crisscrossing the country—the Jinhu site is a veritable monument to a particular notion of rural modernization and development.
When driving north along the national highway,maceta 5 litros one encounters first a large billboard explaining that one is approaching China’s “first low-carbon national tourist site.” Behind the billboard, one sees the new houses arranged in a perfect grid, quite distinct from the more haphazard arrangement of farmhouses and fields in the traditional villages . Less than a kilometer beyond the New Village, one reaches the entrance to Jinhu Rural World theme park, situated on the east side of the highway. Here two large billboards announce: “National AAAA tourist site—National modern technology agricultural experimental site—National agricultural tourist demonstration site—Welcome to Jinhu experimental site!” According to the master plan—which appears on one of the billboards— the rural world theme park will eventually have 41 attractions. However, as of June 2012, only 16 projects were finished and open to tourists. Below I analyze the built environment of Jinhu New Village and Jinhu Rural World theme park, paying particular attention to how rural space is undergoing transformation and to how the “New Countryside” contrasts with the old countryside and traditional rural society.One’s first impression of Jinhu New Village is of a modern suburb imported from somewhere in the United States. It is a large housing complex, with houses that are remarkably uniform in structure and physical appearance laid out on a grid consisting of alleyways running either perpendicular or parallel to the national highway. The residences nearest to the highway are two- or three-story townhouses; further from the highway are several rows of new apartment buildings. The aesthetics of the new residences stand in stark contrast to the vernacular architectural style of the old red brick peasant houses, a few of which still stood undemolished just southeast of the New Village. This aesthetic of the New Village is a curious mimicry of American “streetcar” and “sitcom” suburbs, those suburbs that Dolores Hayden describes as refilecting the American “idealized life in single-family houses with generous yards”. More specifically, the dwellings in the New Village, with their white stucco walls, their grey-tile roofs, and their uniformity of appearance, resemble in remarkable ways tract housing in American suburbia—such as in the Los Angeles Basin . As in any American suburb, each house also has a garage, with additional parking available in clearly marked parking spaces along the alleyways. Many aspects of this new Chinese suburbia seem out of place in the Chinese context.
Grass lawns may have particular symbolic significance in American urban and suburban environments , but from a Chinese peasant’s perspective, grass is a weed that infects one’s fields, the last thing one would think of deliberately planting beside one’s home. The garages and parking lots are also curiosities given that very few peasant households in Jinhu own a car. Many peasants currently use their garages to store their agricultural tools. The New Village does not merely emulate American suburbia; it also contains elements of a China-specific vision of the urban modern, as represented by an orderly but dense arrangement of tall buildings. In American suburbia, the ideal consists of single detached family houses placed in a landscaping that tries to imitate the natural environment. However, in Jinhu New Village, one experiences a much greater feeling of density, highlighted by the concentration of residences, including both rows of two- to three-story stucco houses—called bieshu in Chinese—and blocks of six- to seven-story apartment buildings. The term bieshu ordinarily refers to detached houses. At Jinhu, however, they are not free-standing; they are much more like townhouses or row houses than detached single-family houses. One way to explain this preference for a densely built environment is to consider the perceived ecological limitations of Chinese agricultural land. The central government has in recent years expressed concern for China’s “national food security,” leading to various strategies to maximize available arable land, a point I will address later in detail. However, there is another equally plausible explanation. For the Chinese urban elites, tall buildings and uniform orderliness symbolize modern life. For example, many Chinese government officials and nouveaux riches traveling to the U.S. are quite disappointed by their experience—if the U.S. is so modern, why do the vast dense expanses of awe-inspiring skyscrapers exist only in New York City and Chicago, and not in other American cities and towns?10 The orderliness and density of Jinhu New Village, then, is a public advertisement of how fortunate the displaced peasants are to be living in a new modern environment. Besides the modern architectural styles and the orderly arrangement of buildings,cultivo de la frambuesa the modern environment of Jinhu New Village is also refilected inside the homes. Here, one finds a variety of conveniences unavailable in the old villages, including flush toilets, solar powered water heaters, running water, reliable plumbing, built-in gas stoves, garbage collection, and even high-speed internet.
Although my host Mrs. Tang had only a second grade education, she was adamant about the importance of using computers and accessing the internet, by means of which she learned a great deal chatting with other netizens. Indeed, computers and the internet seem generally to be welcome by most peasants in rural China. Other particularly appreciated modern conveniences are showers and hot water, made possible by the solar-powered water heaters installed on the roofs of the houses. I have observed these new water heaters in New Countryside housing projects . Much like the entire Jinhu development site, the space of the New Village is clearly compartmentalized with well-delineated commercial, communal, governmental, and private residential zones. The core of the New Village is organized around a T-shaped axis . Immediately after entering the New Village by the main gate, one faces a two-lane street with commercial shops on both sides . At the far end of this street is a perpendicular street that forms the top of the T. One side of this second street is also occupied by commercial space. A multi-story building houses the police station, the community administrative office , and a “petition office” that handles grievances.Beside the government building is a three-story pre-school and kindergarten, a basketball court, and an indoor market place . Further from the T-shaped axis and on all sides are the private residences. The two- or three-story townhouses stand closer to the national highway; the apartment blocks lie just beyond the community and administration buildings. Throughout the New Village, iron fences separate public spaces from private residential yards, and curbs demarcate the boundaries between pedestrian and vehicular zones of circulation. None of these various ways of compartmentalizing space—derived from Western urban models—were present in the old natural villages. Despite the orderliness and the conveniences of the modern built environment, all is not as it seems, since the new houses come with a variety of extra costs that peasants were not burdened with in their old villages.
The cost of high-speed internet access is roughly USD $25 per month, a fee that also includes unlimited local phone calls. Peasants accept this fee more readily than some of the other charges they face, as it provides a service they did not formerly enjoy. By contrast, from the peasant’s perspective, the cost of water and natural gas are more difficult to accept. In the old villages, water was freely drawn from wells; and they used gathered firewood rather than gas for cooking. Most significant of all, however, their cost of living is now much higher because food has to be purchased instead of being produced on their land, a concept utterly alien to the peasants. While staying in the village, the most common complaint I heard was that residents no longer had land for cultivating vegetables and raising domestic animals. Now they had to buy food from supermarkets. Inevitably, village residents have found ways to cut living expenditures by a variety of means. To avoid using running water, women wash vegetables and laundry in the canal built next to the main road. For drinking water, many households invest in a well, which they dig in their small backyards. Not only is well water free, peasants also consider it to be cleaner than tap water. In a similar fashion, to minimize natural gas usage, many households have purchased portable pre-made cylinder-shaped aluminum stoves. Around 5 am every morning, in order to boil water, Mrs. Tang’s father-in-law got up to start a fire in the aluminum stove, using wood collected from demolished houses. This was a common practice: with the stove set right outside the garage door, he would chat—sometimes standing and sometimes sitting on a stool—with two other neighbors who were also doing the same thing. Another way to save on cooking expense is to build an old-style firewood stove in one’s backyard. One couple running a majiang parlor out of their home did just this, despite warnings from the New Village management, who has ordered them to demolish it, on the grounds that it was ugly and damaged the orderly and neat image of the New Village. There are other ways in which, in order to save money, residents resist the management’s efforts to maintain a neat appearance. To mitigate the daily cost of food, residents in Jinhu New Village utilize all sorts of marginal land around the edge of the complex. In some cases, they have gotten rid of the lawn near their houses by spreading herbicides left over from their farming days. Another less destructive way is to dig a hole just large enough to plant pumpkins or other vegetables that grow vertically, plants that can more discretely blend into the lawn and tree landscaping. Chickens are also allowed to roam freely on and around the landscaping . All of these various survival strategies constitute continuities with common practices in the old villages; all are very much part of the peasants’ familiar habitus.But the “landless” peasants residing in the New Village have also turned to other more novel strategies to help them make ends meet. Numerous residents have converted their townhouses for commercial purposes, something they would not have done in their old villages. One common small business is a restaurant.