Lament over a 'lost' hometown strikes a chord with rural young

A shantytown area in Beijing. China will expand the use of municipal bonds as part of a broader plan to increase funding for its urbanization program, according to a senior PBOC official. HUA YU/CHINA DAILY

"Where is my lost hometown?" In a recent article, Wang Leiguang, a Ph.D. candidate at Shanghai University, painted for his rural hometown a picture of economic deterioration, increasingly colder interpersonal relations, and naked utilitarianism sweeping every corner. He lamented that many people's hometown are being lost in this way. The article has become very popular, with many young people sharing his feelings. Comments:

According to latest data, the urbanization rate of China was 54.77 at the end of 2014, which means the number of urban residents was greater than the number of rural residents. The urbanization trend will continue. Since the majority of the elite, working population flow into cities, economic deterioration of the rural regions is inevitable. For those growing up in these areas, the process might be painful and full of conflicts, but the trend towards more convenient lives is irreversible. The question is not how to equalize cities and villages, but how to make the remaining rural regions prosperous, too.

Beijing News, Feb 26

Every Spring Festival people complain about interpersonal relations getting colder. The days when we were intimate with each other might be a sweet memory, but with social progress and transformation, the mode we interact with each other will of course change. We need to adapt to this change positively instead of sitting idle in dreams of the past, because it is the sure trend of social development.

China Youth Daily, Feb 26

It was the unequal policies that favored cities at the cost of villages that made and widened the gap between them in the past decades. Now as the cities are well-developed, the gap is increasingly obvious and more problems have emerged. There is no solution to these problems other than developing rural regions and boosting their prosperity.

Guangming Daily, Feb 26

Many people echo the sentiment of the article by saying "our villages have fallen". But when have our villages been strong? For centuries, the rulers that resided in cities collected tax and siphoned off the labor force even women from the villages, yet few of them ever repaid the villages in any way. A new model is now needed to help the rural areas.