The first site: "City villagers" go further

"Can't go back anymore." Looking at the old chat with the old friends, it is turning into a brick and tile, 80-year-old Lu Zhong looked dazed.

Lu Zhong is a “village in the village” village of Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, which is being demolished as a whole. The village is close to Yingze Avenue, an important main road in Taiyuan. Many years ago, it was surrounded by a series of surrounding city buildings. The "village committee" was changed to a "residential committee" several years ago.

In China, the so-called Chengzhong Village means that in the process of rapid urban development, after the rural land was completely expropriated and the rural collective members were transformed from peasant status to resident status, they still lived in residential areas that were transformed from the original village. Divorced from modern urban management, it used to have a relatively low standard of living. It is also known as the "urban village."

In Taiyuan City, there are more than 150 villages like this, involving 427,700 residents of 102,400 households. Starting in 2011, the city launched a large-scale transformation and demolition plan and began the reconstruction of hundreds of “villages in the city”. At the same time, it plans to implement demolition of the whole village of 60 “villages in the city.”

At the beginning of 2012, the city proposed a plan to “remove 17 city-wide villages in one year”. At present, this work is advancing, and its scale and intensity are rare in China's urban agglomerations.

Demolition of "villages in the city" is an ordinary part of China's urbanization process. In the flood of urban agglomerations, the story of Taiyuan is only a microcosm.

“The village house was almost demolition, and the previous neighbors were all moved away. It was quite a memory of the past.” Lu Zhong was a little excited. “I lived here from an early age, and I could touch my way with my eyes closed.”

“There was a vegetable plot there before, and a few villages nearby supported the food baskets of Taiyuan citizens, winter cabbage, summer beans, and tomatoes.” The old road pointed to a modern building not far away. Shortly after the founding of New China, he studied at a school in the city of Taiyuan. He rode bicycles and playmates on the roadside of the fields and frantically pursued classes in the city.

The old road has been working here for a lifetime, nurturing ten children, years of wrinkles inscribed on the texture, and this village, which witnessed his entire life, has now been razed to the ground.

In recent years, China’s urbanization has accelerated, and many of these villages have once been a good place for migrant workers. Lao Lu said that in the past, there were less than a thousand people in the village, and the number of people who later worked lived in excess of 10,000. At the end of the last century, villagers without land began to stamp out housing rentals, and rent became an important source of their economy.

Unlike the old road, Li Yan (a pseudonym) of the same village likes this change. “The reconstruction is very good. The life of the city is better than the village. Only the old neighborhood was scattered in all directions.”

Li Yan is still operating a telephone billing hall in the broken village. Her house was demolished six months ago and she is waiting for a new resettlement house. Before moving away, the whole family deliberately photographed Zhang Quanfu in front of the old house. Her son, who is still in college, hopes her family will be assigned to a high-rise apartment. "This is a night view of the city."

“It's a bit reluctant.” Wang Yufei, a Yuncheng boy who had rented for years in the former Beitun Village of Taiyuan, has now had his own housing through installments. He said, “This place has given me a place to rest and gave a lot of foreigners in Taiyuan, witnessing the time when I used to have dreams and difficulties in chasing life.” (End)

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