There have been numerous accounts, including in China’s press, of village residents being beaten and intimidated to make them leave their homes
surprising amount of earth-moving equipment on the otherwise sleepy rural back roads of Binzhou prefecture in the eastern province of Shandong. Some of it is being used to build an irrigation channel to draw in water from the nearby Yellow river. But much of it is being used for destruction. At a turning off a county highway, a sign points to Zhaibo village. It no longer exists. The machines have already done their job of levelling Zhaibo and carrying away the debris.
For some of those relocated, the new settlements may have advantages. The hollowing out of villages left many rural schools with hardly any students. Local governments responded by closing many of them: between 2000 and 2015 more than 300,000 primary schools—nearly three-quarters of the countryside’s total—were shut. This forced many children to trudge long distances to class, or attend state boarding schools.
In a widely read essay Lu Dewen, a rural-affairs specialist at Wuhan University, described the abuses suffered by villagers in Shandong. He said that unlike the coronavirus pandemic—a “haze that will eventually pass”—the village consolidation campaign has been a “man-made disaster” with no regard for human emotions, and with fearsome psychological effects that will last a lifetime. Remarkably, state-owned media joined the chorus of criticism.
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