Guaranteed homes for all rural families

XI'AN: Despite meeting two women who liked him, 22-year-old Xiao Rong's hopes of romance went up in smoke when his potential partners found out he lived in a 27-sq-m thatched cottage with his parents and did not have a place of his own.

So when the resident of Xianyang, Shaanxi province, saw a news broadcast on a secondhand TV set saying the authorities planned to spend 111.8 billion yuan ($15.4 billion) over the next five years to improve people's livelihood, he was overjoyed.