Society

Poverty-hiding 'Loincloth'

By Li Qian (Chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2007-04-18 16:42

Some officials in Gansu Province have cleaned up their cities and villages in an innovative way.

In Yongjing County, in northwestern Gansu Province, more than two kilometres of walls were built flanking one side of a major road. Unlike sound insulation boards in cities, these walls are not used to reduce traffic noise in roadside village homes, but to hide them from sight of drivers and passersby.

Villagers' homes are seen separated from the road with a wall in Yongjing County, northwest China's Gansu Province in this picture taken on April 11, 2007. [Xinhua]

The brick and cement wall, painted into purplish blue and red, emerges even more conspicuous among the khaki-coloured loess hills. Behind the two-metre-tall wall, is a sprawl of villagers' houses and yards, which are roughly built with mud. In some areas of this impoverished county, 70 per cent of residents or more are living under the national poverty line.

According to a local farmer, the project started in late 2006, when officials of the county ordered the construction of the wall alongside the road reaching Lanzhou, the provincial capital.

"It's nicer to look at, so people won't see how shabby our homes are from the road," villager Zhang Ping said. In front of her house was a sheepfold and a pile of firewood. She said she had no money to renovate the house or build a new one, so the local government tried to disguise the scene with a wall of cement.

The wall, dubbed an "official loincloth" by villagers, has made their lives more inconvenient. Villager Zhang Tianzhi has had to close his roadside shop after the wall was finished, and he even had trouble entering his own home.

From early 2006, the central government urged local officials to build a new countryside and to improve farmers' living conditions. However, some local governments, in pursuit of "political achievements", prefer easy and instant ways to make the region look developed.

"Building walls is to beautify the villages," a vice governor of the Yongjing County said. Last year in a poverty-alleviation plan of the county, "building 1,200 metres of a cultural wall" is mentioned as one of their projects, and the "cultural wall" is exactly what is standing there now.