Lessons from the villages

A US-returned student is taking city-bred youngsters to rural areas to give them a taste of the countryside. 

Wang Xingyu's first trip to the village of Jinlong last August was one of discovery. The 26-year-old Wang drove about 20 hours from Shanghai to observe and study the small, remote and isolated village in Huayuan county, in the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao autonomous prefecture in Central China's Hunan province, which has about 600 ethnic Miao people.

And what Wang saw there－the mountains, rivers, narrow lanes and wooden houses－was in sharp contrast to New York, where he lived from 2015 to 2017 while studying for his master's degree in international relations at New York University.

"When I was abroad, people would ask me questions about China, such as 'What is China like?' I realized then that I could think only of big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. But that's not the whole picture of China because the population of rural areas is quite large. So, I wanted to see what China was really like," says Wang.

According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, by the end of 2016, the total population of the Chinese on the mainland was almost 1.4 billion, an increase of 8.09 million from the end of 2015.