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In China, the chinese used villages and specific housing shapes to differentiate their culture from everyone else's. Normally Chinese villages at the peak of mountainous areas. But, as technology and industry has advanced over the last few centuries, more than 2.3 million village homes have been abandoned or destroyed.

Question A. During what century were Chinese villages being abandoned?

Question B. How many villages are being destroyed each day?

Question C.How do villagers still practice their tradition outside of their villages?

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An article of  how popular Culture is an obstacle to retaining Chinese villages

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An article of  how popular Culture is an obstacle to retaining Chinese villages

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TRADITIONAL Chinese villages, the carrier of folk cultures and customs, are dying with the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of China.

As traditional villages are scattered all over the country, their preservation is more difficult than the protection of the Imperial Palace, according to Lou Qingxi, professor of Chinese ancient architecture at Tsinghua University.

Rich in cultural heritage, the traditional villages are considered the root of Chinese culture and the soul of the Chinese nation, but the dire reality is that they are vanishing at a faster pace than ever before, and at the same time, the lack of funding makes their protection even more difficult.

Liang Hongsheng, a professor from Jiangxi Normal University, is dedicated to the development and preservation of ancient villages and townships in southern China. He has travelled all over the cities and counties within the Jiangxi province in the past 25 years.

From what he has seen, he lamented the fact that the ancient villages of Anyi in Nanchang city, listed as the first batch of famous historical and cultural villages in China, should have been better preserved, but many wooden houses have rotted away due to lack of funding. Without effective protection measures, the villages will soon die out.

In China, more ancient villages remain in the underdeveloped regions because of less exploitation, but local governments there can spare little money on protection.

For those inscribed on the national list of traditional Chinese villages, each receives a subsidy of three million yuan, an amount that is far from enough to bear the cost of maintenance and renovation of the ancient architecture.

Another cause for concern among experts is "destruction in the course of renovation". In some ancient villages, after the wooden pillars of an old house were damaged by termites, villagers do not have money to buy wood but instead use concrete columns for its reparation. In this way, the original structure of the architecture is compromised.

It is therefore a matter of great urgency to overcome the difficulties in the preservation of traditional villages by integrating resources and spending funds more effectively.

Nowadays, cultural tourism has been introduced to many ancient villages in the less developed areas and it has brought economic benefits to local people.

Su Youquan, an official from Fujian Provincial Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, said that economic benefits, as an outcome of cultural tourism, stimulate the local villagers' protection awareness about ancient architecture and strengthen their sense of pride in traditional culture, which in turn promotes the protection of their village.

However, experts also emphasised that tourism development should not be carried out at the expense of damage to the original features and appearance of the traditional villages.

In Chaji village in Jing county of Anhui province, the construction of tourist facilities has been built on the periphery of the ancient village to retain its pastoral landscape.

Meanwhile, in Wuyuan county of Jiangxi province, the construction of new residential houses should strictly follow the government planning graph to make sure the features of buildings are consistent with that of the ancient villages.

Besides, some experts also suggest that the protection of the folk culture should be given equal attention in the preservation of ancient villages, because the intangible cultural heritage is the soul.

The preservation of traditional Chinese villages is an urgent matter; it should not just be a government-led effort, the masses are encouraged to join this cause, some experts said.
-By arrangement with China Daily-Asia News Network Published in Dawn, January 31st, 2015 On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play

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Traditional Chinese villages in urgent need of preservation

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TRADITIONAL Chinese villages, the carrier of folk cultures and customs, are dying with the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of China. As traditional villages are scattered all over the country, their preservation is more difficult than the protection of the Imperial Palace, according to Lou Qingxi, professor of Chinese ancient architecture at Tsinghua University.

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CHINESE VILLAGES

There are around 1 million villages in China, about one third of the world's total. Each village has an average of 916 people. A typical small-to-medium-size village is made up of perhaps 7 to 10 clans, 50 to a 100 families and 500 or so people. Most have of individual residences and community houses such as a meeting house, religious building or ancestor hall. Sometimes the residences are grouped together. Other times they are quite spread apart. Landowners, chiefs or traders sometimes live in a larger, nicer houses than everybody else.

Villages typically have a communal well, a communal area for washing clothes, and an area for threshing grain. Sewer facilities are absent. People either go in the fields or in outhouses. If there is a road it often dead ends in the village.

Traditional villages are relatively self sufficient. Residents grow there own food. Their political and social units are the tribe and the village. Customs and traditions are passed down orally. Shaman and healers take care of health care. Someone in the village may sell things like cigarettes, soap, grain, sugar and cooking fuel out of their house.

Many people live in villages that can not even be reached by road. They can only be reached by walking paths or rutted cart tracks. These are often the poorest villages.

Good Websites and Sources: Book: Rural Life in Modern China by C.F. Mobo ; Rural Life in Northern China members.shaw.ca ; Wikipedia article Wikipedia ; NPR Pieces on Rural China npr.org ; People's Daily article peopledaily.com ; Library of Congress loc.gov ; Books: Will the Boat Sink the Water: The Life of China's Peasants by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao (Public Affairs, 2006); Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China by David Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)

Links in this Website: POOR PEOPLE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; RURAL LIFE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; VILLAGES IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; URBAN LIFE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; MIGRANT WORKERS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; AGRICULTURE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; AGRICULTURE IN CHINA UNDER THE COMMUNISTS Factsanddetails.com/China ; PROBLEMS FACED BY FARMERS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; LAND SEIZURES AND FARMERS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; RICE AGRICULTURE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China

Village Structure in China

Most rural Chinese live in one of some 900,000 villages, which have an average population of from 1,000 to 2,000 people. Villages have never been self-contained, self-sufficient units, and the social world of Chinese peasants has extended beyond their home villages. Almost all new wives come into a village from other settlements, and daughters marry out. All villagers have close kinship ties with families in other villages, and marriage gobetweens shuttle from village to village. [Source: Library of Congress]

"Before 1950 clusters of villages centered on small market towns that linked them to the wider economy and society. Most peasants were only a few hours' walk or less from a market town, which provided not only opportunities to buy and sell but also opportunities for entertainment, information, social life, and a host of specialized services. The villages around a market formed a social unit that, although less immediately visible than the villages, was equally significant. [Ibid]

From the early 1950s on, China's revolutionary government made great efforts to put the state and its ideology into direct contact with the villages and to sweep aside the intermediaries and brokers who had traditionally interpreted central policies and national values for villagers. The state and the party were generally successful, establishing unprecedented degrees of political and ideological integration of villages into the state and of villagelevel awareness of state policies and political goals. [Ibid]

The unintended consequence of the economic and political policies of the 1950s and 1960s was to increase the closed, corporate quality of China's villages and to narrow the social horizons of villagers. Land reform and the reorganization of villages as subunits of people's communes meant that villages became collective landholding units and had clear boundaries between their lands and those of adjacent villages. Central direction of labor on collective fields made the former practices of swapping labor between villages impossible. The household registration and rationing systems confined villagers to their home settlements and made it impossible for them to seek their fortune elsewhere. Cooperation with fellow villagers and good relations with village leaders became even more important than they had been in the past. The suppression of rural markets, which accompanied the drive for self-sufficiency in grain production and other economic activities, had severe social as well as economic consequences. Most peasants had neither reason nor opportunity for regular trips to town, and their opportunities for exchange and cooperation with residents of other villages were diminished. Villages became work units, with all that that implied. [Ibid]

Decollectivization in the early 1980s resulted in the revival of rural marketing, and a limited relaxation of controls on outmigration opened villages and diminished the social boundaries around them. The social world of peasants expanded, and the larger marketing community took on more significance as that of the village proper was diminished. Village membership, once the single most important determinant of an individual's circumstances, became only one of a number of significant factors, which also included occupation, personal connections, and managerial talent. [Ibid]

Loyalty to a Village

Villagers often are born, married and die in the same village. Some die without ever having ventured more than fifty miles away from their homes.

People often feel a stronger a loyalty to their village than they do towards their country or ethnic group. Even city dwellers have a strong bond to their home village even if it has been generations since their family lived there.

Almost everyone is linked in someway to a village somewhere. During holidays many city people leave the city to return to their villages and many people like to be buried in their village along with their ancestors after they die

Chinese Villages

Most rural Chinese have traditionally lived in villages in the plains and river valleys. In places such as the mountains and dry plains where the land isn't so productive, villages rarely have more than a 100 households. In places where the land is productive and intensive agriculture is practiced, large villages with 500 or more household are common and these have traditionally been within walking distance of a market town.

Villages usually have no restaurants, no shops, no bus service. There may a tea shop where people socialize and a small store in someone's house. Some villages are serviced by flat bed trucks that arrive two or three times a week to sell basic groceries. Otherwise to get things one has to travel a considerable distance away. The most remote villages are reached by mountain paths and have no electricity or running water. Making a phone calls requires a hike of several hours to a village large enough to have a store.

Most villages have government propaganda speakers mounted on telephone poles. They come to life in the morning and just before sunset, with village announcements, national news and Communist slogans. Many villages that retain their names from the Maoist era have names like Brigade 281. Most villagers have no idea when their village was founded.

Many villages have a Respect Your Ancestors Hall. Some are in dilapidated condition. Some have never been repaired since the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards destroyed centuries-old murals and painted Maoist slogans..

Village Customs

Chinese traditionally been loyal to their home villages and neighborhoods. Even when they move away they try to return particularly around Chinese New Year.

Villagers often don't knock when they visit a neighbor; they just walk in.

Villagers rarely see foreigners. If the do see one, they are a source of endless fascination and villagers will stare and stare and stare at them. Villagers also often don't have a sense of how big cities are. With some villagers, if you tell them you are from Beijing they will aks you if you know so and so.

Villagers assist one another in various ways. They help each other plant and harvest their crops and build their homes. If someone has a serious health problem often everyone in the village who can pitches in at least some money to help pay the medical bills. Villagers also lend a hand taking care of widows and orphans, fighting fires and helping to fix farm equipment.

Village Life

Village members often belong to the same clan or extended family and have the same last name. Problems are often not openly discussed because they involve family members.

It is not usual for women to have long-running affairs or children by three different husbands, skipping town every time officials swept through looking for unaccounted-for children.

On Near Year's Day, addresses of local officials are broadcast on the loudspeaker system and officials give liquor and pastries to village elders.

In some places corn is laid on the roads to dry and the few drivers that show up are encouraged to drive back and forth over the corn to help ground it.

Those with television sets often have them running constantly. By the late 2000s, cable television with 50 channels was available in many villages.

Loudspeaker systems left over from the Cultural Revolution are often not used at all or used only to announce infrequent party meetings in the village playground. In some villages they are used to tell villagers how much they owe on their utility bills: "Hut number 2 owes 13 yuan for electricity, 2 yuan for water" and the like.

Villagers rarely ride in vehicles. When they do it is not unusual for them to get car sick.

In some villages with several hundred people no one owns an automobile and a single person owns a phone or cell phone. Many villages were in this situation in the early 2000s but many are beyond that stage now.

Village Governments

The village chief is selected openly.

Real power lies with the Party Secretary who is selected every three years during a closed-door session by local Communist Party members. The selection process is often an exercise in guangxi with the process manipulated by township party officials, the next level up from the village. In selection meetings there is little if any talk about platforms and policies. If the township official give a speech praising every thing the existing party secretary has done, the local members echo these sentiments in their speeches and the party secretary is re-elected.

Village governments have a lot of power. They handle major land transactions and can break a 30-year lease for a nominal fee if a city developer wants some land. Village leaders must approve individual applications for government loans.

A typical village council is made up of 18 men and three women members of the Communist Party. Those with the most power are often respected the most by the others and skilled at dealing with higher up officials.

Party membership has traditionally been very selective. These days many urban people see few advantages with joining but in rural areas party members are often still regarded as the elite and membership can protect individual interests. People in a village that have business interests often join the party to protect those interests.

Typical meetings include self criticism sessions and reading of long jargon-filled passages from government documents.

China has already hired 200,000 college graduates as village officials, believing more educated cadres will speed rural development.

Village Economics

No restaurants, no shops, no places to spend money. A few times a week a peddler arrives in a flatbed truck loaded with food and simple household goods for sale. During harvests other trucks show up to buy the harvest.

According to a study by PlaNet Finance, a Paris-based organization, 228 million rural residents are unable to obtain services. The Grameen bank has supported many microcredit programs in China since the mid 1990s but they have only touched the tip of the iceberg.

Many rural people are discriminated against when finding jobs because the have the physique and dark skin of peasants.

Nobel-Prize-Winning Economist Visits Chinese Village

On a visit by 2001 Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz to Dimen, a 500-household Dong village 400 kilometers away from Guiyang in Guizhou Province, Reuters reported: "Keen on the Chinese economy, the former World Bank chief economist scrutinized the Chinese government's 11th five-year plan which described rural development at length and could hardly wait to find out what's going on in China's countryside. [Source: Reuters, March 21, 2007 |+|]

"The improvement of rural infrastructure is impressive," said Stiglitz, "the road, cell phone towers ... there is very good cell phone signal in the rural area. Even in a very small village, there is Internet." he said with a smile. "The Chinese government's policy of building new socialism countryside is contributing to the improvement of living standard in rural areas," he added. But the increasing gap between rich and poor could trigger more social and economic problems, said the professor who won the prize for his "analyses of markets with asymmetric information". |+|

"The photographic enthusiast shot almost everything on his way -- the newly-built toilets, farmers, kids, their food and furniture. Boosting the agricultural productivity, creating job opportunities and promoting infrastructure development are important to improve the living standard in rural areas, said Stiglitz. For example, the peasants cannot sell their products to the market without road, and infrastructure development, such as house and road construction can help to create job opportunities, he said, chawing the vegetable grown in the rare cultivable soil of Guizhou. Several years ago, many poor households in the province even had not enough food and clothes for every family member. The local government has therefore promoted emerging industries to help people get rid of poverty. Tourism has been one of those highlighted industries. |+|

"After 30 years of economic reform and open-up, there are still nearly 3 million people, almost eight percent of the province's population, living on an average of 625 yuan (about 81 U.S. dollars) per year in Guizhou. In an earlier interview with a US-based media, Stiglitz suggested not to overestimate China's development and indicated that the country had found her own way of development. Different countries have different choices, China is creating a new market economy model with Chinese characteristics that is consistent with China's distinct circumstances and values, said the economist. |+|

"He elaborated that China's new model focuses on four aspects -- the imparity among regions and between urban and rural areas; environment problem; independent innovation; and making the export-oriented economy more dependent on domestic demands. "US has little to teach China about steady economy," said the economist in a published article. Nevertheless, the keen observer suggested the country should improve social welfare to lower its high savings, a strategy to base the already export-fueled economy more on domestic consumption." |+|

Villages Full of Old People and Left Behind Children in China

These days many villages are empty. The one-child policy has reduced the number of children. Young families often move away. Parents seek migrant worker jobs in the cities. The children of families that remain often go to school in a larger village and town. The only people that remain are the elderly.

In a typical village of 4,000 half the people have left to look for work. Many villages are inhabited almost exclusively by old people, with old men and women even doing the heavy farm work. Other villages are filled mostly with women because most of the men are gone in search of work. In others still the young women have left to work in factories and the young men left behind to do farm work say they are so poor that no women want to marry them.

With parents gone searching for jobs many children are left behind to be brought up by grandparents or other relatives. The only time they see their parents is when they return home over Chinese New Year holiday and even then often the parents don't make it home because they are required to work at their factory or construction site.

These so called "left-behind" children number in the tens of millions and even hundreds of million because there are that many migrant workers in the cities. One 14-year-old who lived alone for a year after her father left for a construction job told the Los Angeles Times, "My parents are away making money so I can have a better life. But I don't care about living a better life. I just want them to be home at my side."

One school principal told the Los Angeles Times, "Most of these students tend to become antisocial and introverted. But in times of conflict, they tend to explode and react in violent extremes." A school counselor said, "These children are so sad. They have to learn early to fend for themselves. There's one family where the grandparents are taking care of four children from three of their sons. All of them are away at work. At best they can make sure the kids are clothed and fed. But they can't fill the emotional emptiness."

Many villages have lost half their population and their schools have been forced to close down. .

For more on this See Rural Life in China

Reborn Villages

Many traditional houses with sloping roofs and mud wall have been replaced by modern boxes with brick walls and tile roofs. Streets named after village chiefs are now numbered roads.

When villagers earn a little bit of money often the first thing do is remodel and upgrade their home. Often this is continuous process, as represented by piles of bricks and cement bags in front of the house.

Describing the area outside of heavily industrialized Ningpo, a city 100 miles south of Shanghai, Jonathan Franzen wrote in The New Yorker, "The countryside seethed with improvement; in some villages it was hard to find a house that didn't have a pile of sand or a stack of bricks in front of it. Farm fields were sprouting factories while, outside the less new factories, the support columns of coming viaducts went up behind scaffolds."

To improve their villages, leaders are given material like A Textbook for Urbanizing the Countryside with passages like: "For hundreds of years and thousands of years, there is a pronounced trend toward small peasant thinking...This creates conflict with the desire to urbanize and improve." But often it was unclear what their aims were.

These days villages around large cities, especially Beijing, are attracting yuppies, artists, nouveau rich and other people with money who hanker for place in the countryside.

Image Sources: 1) Pole man, Bucklin archives http://www.bucklinchinaarchive.com/ ; 2) Chores, Agroecology ; 3) Sewing ladies, Nolls China website http://www.paulnoll.com/China/index.html ; 4) Others Beifan.com http://www.beifan.com/

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton's Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

&copy 2008 Jeffrey Hays

Last updated July 2015

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CHINESE VILLAGES There are around 1 million villages in China, about one third of the world's total. Each village has an average of 916 people. A typical small-to-medium-size village is made up of perhaps 7 to 10 clans, 50 to a 100 families and 500 or so people.

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All of the rural villages the chinese have abandoned for city jobs

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All of the rural villages the chinese have abandoned for city jobs

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Crazy Number of Ghost Cities | China Uncensored

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Abandoned Chinese houses 2016.  Destroyed buildings in China. Abandoned Chinese cities and village

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Amazing selection abandoned houses and homes in China 2016. Destroyed Chinese buildings and houses. Best abandoned town and village in China. Abandoned places in China. Exploring best places in China.

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An article about how China's villages are being destroyed everyday

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An article about how China's villages are being destroyed everyday

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"Chinese culture has traditionally been rural-based," says Feng Jicai, a well-known author and scholar. "Once the villages are gone, the culture is gone."

That is happening at a stunning rate. In 2000, China had 3.7 million villages, according to research by Tianjin University. By 2010, that figure had dropped to 2.6 million, a loss of about 300 villages a day.

For decades, leaving the land was voluntary, as people moved to the cities for jobs. In the past few years, the shift has accelerated as governments have pushed urbanization, often leaving villagers with no choice but to move.

China's top leadership has equated urbanization with modernization and economic growth. Local governments are also promoting it, seeing the sale of rural land rights as a way to compensate for a weak tax base. Evicting residents and selling long-term leases to developers has become a favored method for local governments to balance budgets and local officials to line their pockets. Numerous local officials are under investigation for corruption linked to rural land sales.

Destroying villages and their culture also reveals deeper biases. A common insult in China is to call someone a farmer, a word equated with backwardness and ignorance, while the most valued cultural traditions are elite practices like landscape painting, calligraphy and court music.

But in recent years, Chinese scholars have begun to recognize the countryside's vast cultural heritage. A mammoth government project has cataloged roughly 9,700 examples nationwide of "intangible cultural heritage," fragile traditions like songs, dances, rituals, martial arts, cuisines and theater. About 80 percent of them are rural.

In the past few years, for example, Mr. Feng has documented the destruction of 36 villages in Nanxian, a county on Tianjin's outskirts, home to a famous center of woodblock printing.

"You don't know if it will survive or not because when they're in their new homes they're scattered," he said. "The knowledge isn't concentrated anymore and isn't transmitted to a new generation."

That is the problem facing the musicians in Lei Family Bridge. The village lies on what used to be a great pilgrimage route from Beijing north to Mount Yaji and west to Mount Miaofeng, holy mountains that dominated religious life in the capital. Each year, temples on those mountains would have great feast days spread over two weeks. The faithful from Beijing would walk to the mountains, stopping at Lei Family Bridge for food, drink and entertainment.

Groups like Mr. Lei's, known as pilgrimage societies, performed free for the pilgrims. Their music is based on stories about court and religious life from roughly 800 years ago and features a call-and-response style, with Mr. Lei singing key plotlines of the story and the other performers, decked out in colorful costumes, chanting back. The music is found in other villages, too, but each one has its own repertoire and local variations that musicologists have only begun to examine.

When the Communists took over in 1949, these pilgrimages were mostly banned, but were revived starting in the 1980s when the leadership relaxed control over society. The temples, mostly destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, were rebuilt.

The performers, however, are declining in numbers and increasingly old. The universal allures of modern life - computers, movies, television - have siphoned young people away from traditional pursuits. But the physical fabric of the performers' lives has also been destroyed.

One recent afternoon, Mr. Lei walked through the village, now reduced to rubble and overgrown with wild grass and bushes. He started singing with his grandfather when he was 2. He now has an office job in the city's public transportation company and spends all his vacation time working on the troupe.

"This was our house," he said, gesturing to a small rise of rubble and overgrown weeds. "They all lived in the streets around here. We performed at the temple."

The temple is one of the few buildings still standing. (The Communist Party headquarters is another.) Built in the 18th century, the temple is made of wooden beams and tiled roofs, surrounded by a seven-foot wall. Its brightly painted colors have faded. The weather-beaten wood is cracking in the dry, windy Beijing air. Part of the roof has caved in, and the wall is crumbling.

"It used to be on a list of historic preservation," Mr. Lei said. "The government says it will be rebuilt, but no one seems to know anything."

Government urban-planning officials could not be reached for comment on the village.

Evenings after work, the musicians would meet in the temple to practice. As recently as Mr. Lei's grandfather's generation, the performers could fill a day with songs without repeating themselves. Today, they can sing only a handful. Some middle-aged people have joined the troupe, so on paper they have a respectable 45 members. But meetings are so hard to arrange that the newcomers never learn much, he said, and performing under a highway overpass is unattractive.

"I guess for a lot of us it's a hobby," said Li Lan, 55, a cymbalist and singer. "It's just so inconvenient now to come out here and practice."

Over the past two years, the Ford Foundation underwrote music and performance classes for 23 children from migrant families from other parts of China. Mr. Lei taught them to sing, and to apply the bright makeup used during performances. Last May, they performed at the Mount Miaofeng temple fair, earning stares of admiration from other pilgrimage societies also facing aging and declining membership.

But the project's funding ended over the summer, and the children drifted away.

"I think it's pointless because you have to be from our village to understand how important this is," Mr. Lei said. "Anyway, those children will move somewhere else and won't learn long enough to become real members. It was nice but didn't fix the problem."

One of the oddities of the troupe's struggles is that some traditional artisans now get government support. The government lists them on a national register, organizes performances and offers modest subsidies to some.

Last month, Mr. Lei's group was featured on local television and invited to perform at Chinese New Year activities. Such performances raise about $200 and provide some recognition that what the group does matters.

Du Yang, director of the district office of intangible cultural heritage protection, said the group's music was among 69 protected practices in her district.

"The goal is to make sure these cultural heritages don't get lost," she said. "It would be a great pity if they are lost just as our country is on the road to prosperity."

Mr. Lei said that keeping their village life intact would have helped most.

"It was really comfortable in the old village," he said back in his new home, a small two-bedroom apartment high up in an apartment block a half-hour drive away. "We had a thousand square meters and rented out rooms to migrants from other provinces. Lots of buses stopped nearby, and we could get into the city easily."

Like all rural residents, the Leis and their neighbors never owned their land; all land in China belongs to the state. So when the plans were announced to build the golf course, they had little choice but to move. "No one protested," he said. "We knew we didn't have a choice. You have to just go with the flow."

Everyone got free apartments and $50,000 to $100,000 in compensation.

Strangely, however, the golf course has never been built, and the village still lies in ruins. No one here can figure out if this is because the development was illegal, or perhaps part of a corrupt land deal that is under investigation. Such information is not public, so villagers can only speculate. Mostly, they try to forget.

"I try not to think about these things too much," Mr. Lei said. "Instead, I try to focus on the music and keeping it alive."

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In China, 'Once the Villages Are Gone, the Culture Is Gone'

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"Chinese culture has traditionally been rural-based," says Feng Jicai, a well-known author and scholar. "Once the villages are gone, the culture is gone." That is happening at a stunning rate. In 2000, China had 3.7 million villages, according to research by Tianjin University.