Portraits of village life do not paint the whole picture

Editor's note: That some return-home-during-the-holiday posts depicting the backwardness of life in the countryside have been widely circulated on social media during Spring Festival last week shows a lack of understanding of rural life, said Chen Xiwen, chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, in a recent interview with Outlook Weekly, a news magazine run by Xinhua News Agency. Excerpts:

I read almost all of the popular posts, and I believe most of the problems they exposed are real. The writers' shared nostalgia and concern for their hometowns are palpable.

But still their stories are rich in particularity, but poor in universality. There are more than 3.17 million villages in the country. And when we talk about China's countryside, we should always bear such a big picture in mind. A few stories of some cannot portray the whole.