China unveiled its "No. 1 central document" for 2023 on February 13, outlining tasks to comprehensively promote rural vitalization this year. A conference on high-quality development for counties, towns and villages was held on the same day in Guangdong, the province with the largest GDP nationwide, which shed light on the detailed strategies to be adopted by local governments.
Having been in Guangdong for about 18 years, Jerry Grey, a British-born Australian commentator, loves cycling around and has witnessed the changes in the province’s rural areas over the past decade.
“Developed cities of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) are sharing their resources and technologies with rural areas to achieve coordinated development. It’s an amazing thing because it’s not charity but a system that is built,” said Jerry.
A teaming system adopted to drive regional development in Guangdong
Guangdong can exceed such developed countries as Korea and Australia in terms of economic size. However, it has been tackling the problem of unbalanced development: The nine cities in the region of Pearl River Delta account for 80 percent of the province’s GDP.
To drive regional development, Jerry said Guangdong has adopted a teaming system, or a paring assistance mechanism, in which a rich town will help a poor one, while a rich county will help a poor one. Based on his observation, he considers the system to work very well.
Guangdong launched the paring assistance mechanism within the provincial range in November 2013, where six cities in the Pearl River Delta, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Zhuhai, Zhongshan, and Foshan, formed a partnership with eight cities in the less developed region of eastern, western, and northern Guangdong which are Qingyuan, Heyuan, Shaoguan, Yangjiang, Chaozhou, Yunfu, Shanwei, and Meizhou, in order to help the latter improve their business environments and enhance their ability of self-reliance in economic development.
“The GBA cities such as Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Zhongshan have highly intelligent and mechanized industries. I’m very interested in how these technologies can be translated to helping poorer areas,” Jerry said.
When Jerry visited a rice farm in Qingyuan, he found that the rice farm was equipped with a highly intelligent system. He said, “They control how much water the rice is getting, what the pH balance of the water is, and how much fertilizer the land needs from a control room 30 to 40 kilometres away.”
With the help of Guangzhou, Qingyuan is now constructing the Guangzhou-Qingyuan Special Economic Cooperation Zone. As of August 2022, the cooperation zone has introduced 646 industrial projects, with an investment prospect of nearly 200 billion RMB. In addition, Guangzhou has been supporting Qingyuan to develop its local agricultural products, which helped about 240 thousand farmers increase their income in 2022.
Rural areas are more connected and have greater potential
“Another great thing that Guangdong or China, in general, has done is the continuous improvement of the roads and the train systems. Every single town and county that I’ve been to in China now has a road leading into it,” Jerry said.
He recalled his experiences in a village around a hundred kilometres from Guangzhou. “My wife and I were in a bus going up a mountain track, and I asked her whether we had been there because it looked familiar. And then we realized there was no road when we came here about 12 years ago. Now there are restaurants, hotels, car parks and even coffee shops,” Jerry furthered.
“Having 5G covered everywhere is another achievement China has made to tackle rural development challenges. Rural residents can now communicate as fast, quickly, efficiently and cheaply as urban residents do, which is something the West cannot comprehend,” he added.
With better roads and an efficient communication system, Jerry said, “Some of the rural communities are opening up to visitors so that the income of the city can be shared with the rural, and the region doesn’t die out because there are no job opportunities for young people.”
In addition, convenient transportation and 5G networks boost the development of e-commerce in rural areas. “A lot of courier companies have set up branches in villages, and I saw people working there online and selling products from the village to other parts of China,” Jerry said.
“If a village wants to make money, they have to trade. Therefore, you have to have delivery services. It is significant for poverty alleviation that people can sell their products efficiently and obtain what they want from the outside world,” he noted.
Author | Jasmine, Lydia Liu
Video editor | Axin
Poster designer | Lulu
Editor | Wing, Olivia, James
