Moving from mud huts to apartments

Wang Desheng said his earliest memory is of two shabby huts made of mud, reeds and straw. It's where he lived with his parents and three siblings in the Xiangyang people's commune in Nanjing's Jiangpu county.

The huts were built by a river. When he was 3 years old, he remembers, the inside of the huts became as muddy as the unpaved roads outside whenever it rained.

"The two huts collapsed after one heavy downpour," said Wang, now 47. "We had to move to the commune's oil workshop. My father worked from summer to winter to build another hut for us."