Review of Chenzhou city’s overall development of urban and rural areas during “12th five-year plan”

Lofty Mount Mang, nourish Suxianling, ancient horse trail, harmonious Dongjiang Lake, all are available on your trip to Chenzhou city, but actually the livable and beautiful villages are more worthy of travelling.
Only if rural area becomes more beautiful, Chenzhou city is beautiful; only if rural and urban areas are with their unique features, Chenzhou city is harmonious and livable. Overall development of urban and rural areas bares more than 4million Chenzhou people’s expectation.

During the “12th five-year plan”, Chenzhou city improved overall development of urban and rural areas as the general grasp of Chenzhou city’s take-off. It well seized the chance of “one line, one demonstration point, one area, and one demonstration zone” (eg. the line along high-speed train, Chenzigui ‘two-oriented society’ demonstration point, poverty alleviation of Luoxiao mountainous area, national demonstration zone of south Hunan undertaking industrial transfer) and followed the general idea to improve the balanced configuration of urban and rural public resources, and system & mechanism of free-flowing production elements. It helped to realize the interaction of urban and rural areas and also common development of industry and agriculture.

Beautiful Suxianling

Jiaotang village of Sidu town, Guidong county

Sunflower park of Guanxi village, Zhenghe town, Guiyang county attracted lots of visitors

Some people were picking up rose bergamot in Xianjiang Specialty Fruit Base of Shiqiao town, Jiahe county

Overall planning

As a resource-based city, Chenzhou has its core growth pole as well as concentrated destitute areas, which causes the unbalanced development of urban and rural areas. How to improve the development of rural area? Chenzhou focused its eyes on “overall development”.

Overall development of urban and rural areas: overall is the core point, while the rural area is the key point.

The small town is the bridge for the connection of urban and rural areas and also the belt for improving rural area with the help of urban area. It was purposely to extend the urban infrastructures, public service, and modern civilization to the rural area, improve the equalization of basic public service, and share the achievements of urbanization to all residents by promoting the construction of small town.

Chenzhou city took the urban and rural areas as a whole to handle the overall planning and construction management. Chenzhou Municipal Party Committee and Chenzhou government issued special files for the improvement of overall development of urban and rural areas, and set the strategic targets of “ranking top place of Hunan province on current overall development of urban and rural areas, ranking top place of China in 2020 on the work”.

Chenzhou city did not just focus on central urban area on the process of planning, but it promoted the group development of overall development of urban and rural areas with the model of town cluster. It formulated “general planning for the demonstration belt of Chenzigui ‘two-oriented society- regional planning of Chenzigui town cluster”, “outline for planning of Chenzhou ‘great cross’ town cluster” , and etc. to build 3-million-population city and half-an-hour economic circle of the 300 kilometers big built-up areas.

In order to ensure all the towns and counties to be docked with the general planning of Chenzhou city, Chenzhou Finance allocated special capitals and integrated with different technical resources from government, society and universities to join in the formulation of towns and counties planning, which helped to integrate the planning of urban and rural areas together. Currently, the general planning for all the key organic towns and planning formulation for 2941 administrative villages have been finished, ranking the first place of Hunan province to cover all towns and villages into planning.

Overall prosperity of industries

“I used to be a worker, and operated restaurant in earlier days. In 2009, I came back hometown to plant vegetables by contract,” introduced by Wang Shuofeng – Director of Beihu Sanhe Qiaolong Ecological Agriculture Co., Ltd. The famous leading people of agricultural industry opened the first direct selling supermarket of fruit and vegetables and leisure sightseeing farm of Chenzhou city. Now, 460,000 visitors are received by “Aishang Sanhe” Leisure Sightseeing Park annually. 

Only if the industry can be improved well, the farmers’ income can be increased. Based on the characteristics, foundations and main functional areas of industries, Chenzhou city took active actions on promoting the interactive development of urban and rural industries. It focused on improving urban service industry in central area, distributing industrial parks in suburban areas, and promoting urban agriculture, and leisure sightseeing agriculture in rural areas, which formed an industrial layer pattern inside-out.

Now, the new industrial concentrated area of Chenzhou Avenue, Chenguijia modern tobacco agriculture belt, Linwu duck industrial belt, Jiahe casting industrial belt, Yongxing precious metals smelting and processing industrial belt and sweet orange industrial belt, Yizhang navel orange industrial belt, Anren high quality rice industrial belt, Rucheng &guiding ecological agriculture belt have been preliminarily shaped in Chenzhou city.

Promoting agriculture industry via industry, trade, and tourism, Chenzhou city kept the concept to promote the agriculture together with extension of industrial chain and agricultural functions, and promote it to be transferred to the joint development of production, processing, circulation, and service from production only.

Thanks to the great efforts placed by Chenzhou city, now it has 305 above scaled agricultural products processing enterprises, 36 national and Hunan provincial level leading enterprises, 24 Hunan provincial 5-starand above level leisure farms, and 65 national demonstrations of professional cooperatives. Zixing Luowei, Guiyang Furong, Linwu Chengdong and some other agricultural processing parks are available there. Linwu Duck, Dongjiang Fish, and Yongxing Sweet Orange were recognized as national geographical indication protection products. Zixing city, Yongxing county and Yizhang county were enrolled into the list of the State designated counties of primary processing of agricultural products. Guiyang county and Xiaobu Ecological Agricultural Industrial Park were honored as national demonstration county and point of leisure agriculture and rural tourism respectively.

Constructing together

New urbanization called for the overall development of urban and rural areas of Chenzhou city. “City construction battle” and “great city construction” were launched sequentially. The central urban area of Chenzhou took the first step of upgrading and reconstruction work to extend arterial roads of urban area, reconstruct the backstreets, build Sports Center, Art & Performance Center, Convention & Exhibition Center, and some key administrative projects. All people highly appraised that Chenzhou city became more beautiful!

The expansion and upgrading of county downtown was also being promoted rapidly. Rucheng, Guiyang, Yizhang and other some other counties downtowns’ areas and populations are two times more than before. The “one hundred towns and one thousand villages” project which was led by the construction of 30 demonstration towns helped to upgrade series new towns and villages as Wangxian town, Huangcao town, Heping village, Sanhe village, and etc.

At the meantime, it reached the dislocation development and complementary of advantages by jointing central urban areas of Chenzhou city together with counties (districts, cities). It followed the reasonable principals and applied different solutions to accelerate the construction of well-off villages and guide regulated rural housing in small towns and central villages.

All the counties (cities, districts) explored their unique measures for the construction of small and medium-sized town cluster. Meitian town of Yizhang county which is famous as “coal town of south Hunan” used to be with 30,000 people exploring mine there every day, causing serious pollution for local environment. But now, Meitian town has been upgraded to be a beautiful town with green mountains, clear water, blue sky and fresh air. The coal mine was constructed to be Meixi Square which becomes one of the favorite leisure places of local villagers.

Currently, 476 well-off villages projects have been launched by Chenzhou city, 201 of which have almost been finished. 19,000 families joined in the concentrated housing project. All of those helped to comprehensive utilization of public resources, accelerate integration of public service, trade & logistics, cultural tourism, and other industries between urban and rural areas, provide better condition for exchange of lands and development of industries, and promote local urbanization.

Improvement of environment

If you travelled around Chenzhou city in this early winter, you can enjoy a nice trip full of clean roads, flourishing parks and clear lakes.

On stepping into Sanguan village of Guiyang county, you can see the new dwellings are decorated among the green mountains, paved roads passed through the village, and all villagers are happy.

In recent years, Chenzhou city placed great efforts on building the landscape urban and rural areas where people can enjoy green mountain, clear water and homeland taste. 17 Hunan provincial new rural demonstration villages, 130 Chenzhou municipal new rural demonstration villages, 8 Hunan provincial beautiful villages, 8 Chenzhou municipal level beautiful towns and counties, and 55 Chenzhou municipal beautiful villages are available there, which helped to form the new rural construction pattern with gallery, belt, area and point in central city, counties, towns, and villages respectively.

It carried out series greening projects as forestry recovery after ice disaster, greening of arterial roads, greening battle, 3-year greening project, upgrading of forest landscape, establishment of national forest city, and etc. on the basis of its natural advantages on “mountains, water, forest, city”. Currently, its inventory of forest lands is 1.384million hectares, accounting for 71% of its total areas, and forest coverage rate is 67.71%. It preliminarily established compound, multilayer, multifunctional urban and rural green ecological system, and formed new greening pattern full of green networks.

Followed specified requirements and different measures, it launched the regulated rural housing management work firstly in China. The problem that “it has new houses but no new village, it has new village but no new image” was solved fundamentally and a fundamental solution for village construction was figured out by it as well, which upgraded some “rubbish villages” and “hollow villages” to be beautiful villages with tidy layout, perfect infrastructures, and charming sceneries.

“Light up Chenzhou” action helps to warm up people’s heart. Focused with the breakthrough of installation of street lamps, Chenzhou city promoted the upgrading of rural environment comprehensively. 430million yuan was placed on the installation of 72,600 street lamps, which helped to solve the public lightening problem of almost half of the towns and villages of the whole city.