The current trajectory of traditional village evolution is cause for concern

China's traditional villages are undergoing a transformation unprecedented in a thousand years. According to data published by the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2011 China's mainland urban population reached 690.79 million, accounting for 51.27% of the total population and surpassing the rural population for the first time. At the same time, however, rural China has shown a trend of hollowing out: rural residents are flocking to cities, leaving large numbers of villages vacant or abandoned; improvements in road transport, increased population mobility and the expansion of information network coverage have accelerated and intensified the penetration of outside culture into rural areas, pushing village traditional culture toward the margins; rural traditional values are being seriously challenged, family consciousness is fading, and the transmission of clan culture and customary traditions is weakening by the day; the traditional villages and their culture and internal structures, which have endured for several thousand years, are disintegrating and face the danger of disappearing, and it is no exaggeration to say that they have reached "a critical moment of life and death."

General Secretary Xi Jinping once pointed out with deep feeling that "the reason the Chinese nation has been able to endure hardships yet remain endlessly vital and vigorous, and to keep developing and growing stronger, always standing proudly among the nations of the world, is that it has such a rich spiritual homeland and such powerful spiritual support. This is the collective memory and collective call passed down by a great nation over several thousand years." At the Central Urbanization Work Conference, he further earnestly put forward the expectation that "residents should be able to see the mountains, see the water, and remember their nostalgia."

Serious misconceptions about traditional village protection remain

Misconception one: emphasizing the protection of tangible architecture while neglecting the protection of the intangible culture of indigenous residents, or in other words, emphasizing the protection of "static" culture while neglecting the protection of "living" culture. Under such understandings and concepts of protection, protected traditional villages are often merely "dead" buildings without a cultural soul. The value of traditional village culture is not only embodied in architecture, but is even more contained in the "living" aspects of both material and intangible culture, including the production and lifestyles, customs and habits, spiritual beliefs, moral and value orientations, and concepts of the indigenous residents. These are the core of traditional village culture and deserve particular attention and protection. The protection of traditional villages and their culture must never be limited to protecting the style and appearance of traditional village architecture while ignoring the "people" who live in these traditional village buildings, as well as the material and intangible culture created and passed down by those "people." Seeing only things and not people runs counter to the purpose of protection. How can people and things coexist? It is essential to pay attention to the living environment of indigenous residents and every aspect of their production and daily life. Protecting people's livelihoods must always come first in traditional village protection; only in this way can the effectiveness of the protection mechanism be ensured, can traditional village culture be prevented from becoming disconnected from real social life, can a "fault line" in the nation's historical culture be avoided, and can traditional villages and their culture survive "alive" in a vivid form within today's Chinese civilization.

Misconception two: in the process of urbanization and townization, and guided by a performance-oriented view that seeks quick success and instant benefits, many grassroots officials still fail to realize that traditional village culture bears on the nation's historical and cultural memory. They believe that if a traditional village has no development value, cannot raise the local GDP, and cannot help them "win glory and build achievements" in their performance record, then rather than spending effort and money to protect it, it would be better to let it die out. Some may even, driven by economic interests, collude between officials and businesses to carry out "forced demolition" on a large scale.

⟦NL> The Wu Family Garden south of Taigu County town in Shanxi is a complex of ancient buildings. It originally had 7 large residential courtyards, with more than 20 street gates, courtyard gates, waist-wall gates and passage gates of various kinds between the courtyards, and more than 200 rooms including pavilions, terraces and towers. It was once a rare well-preserved Ming and Qing merchant mansion of Shanxi merchants in Taigu County. The Wu Family Garden embodied the characteristics of "refinement" and "ingenuity" in the courtyard style of China's ancient "Jin" region and was formally listed in 2008 as a county-level "cultural relic protection unit." Yet in 2014, such an architectural complex rich in Shanxi regional style was listed as a key urban district redevelopment project and tragically subjected to forced demolition. For such a traditional village and "immovable cultural relic" of important historical and cultural significance and value, its value lies in preserving for future generations a true and objective site that records historical civilization. But now the site is nothing but bricks and tiles scattered on the ground, and "cultural heritage" has become an eternal "cultural regret"!

Land poisoning leads to the emergence of new "hollow villages"

Soil contains all things, and all things sustain people's livelihoods, which is why land is called Mother by humankind. However, along with the rapid development of China's industrialization and urbanization, rural land has been continuously harmed by various sources of pollution. China's current land pollution situation is extremely severe. Statistics from the Ministry of Land and Resources show that more than 10% of the country's cultivated land area is already contaminated by heavy metals, including 30 million mu of cultivated land polluted by mining areas, 7,500 million mu of cultivated land polluted by oil, about 750,000 mu polluted by solid waste dumping, nearly 150 million mu polluted by the "three industrial wastes," and nearly 50 million mu of farmland irrigated with sewage, causing the soil to basically lose its productivity and become "toxic soil." This does not even include the deep pollution of land by pesticides and chemical fertilizers. China's pesticide use reaches 1.3 million tons, 2.5 times the world average. The intensification of pollution has led to a substantial decline in the soil's natural capacity to retain water and fertilizer, the organic nutrient components it contains, and the depth of cultivable soil, and it directly affects crop yield and quality and endangers human health.