China reports over 8,000 villages with 100m yuan

NANCHANG—More than 8,000 villages on the Chinese mainland have each generated wealth of 100 million yuan (13.3 million U.S. dollars) or more since the first of its kind emerged in 1987, according to a latest survey.
The villages, including 11 ones whose gross domestic product surpasses 10 billion yuan (1.3 billion U.S. dollars) each, create a total of 1.6 trillion yuan of wealth, show the statistics from the Chinese Association for Promoting Township and Village Development. The survey shows more than 60 percent of the 100-million-yuan villages are located in eastern developed regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Guangdong and Zhejiang. The development of the villages is mainly driven by special farming and raising industries, heavy industries, tourism, trade and commerce, it says.
Daqiu village in the suburbs of Tianjin became the first 100-million-yuan village in 1987 on the Chinese mainland, driven by industries such as steel and printing since the country started economic reform and opening-up policy in 1978.
In 2003, Huaxi village, in east China’s Jiangsu Province, became the first village to generate 10 billion yuan of gross domestic product. China now has 600,000 villages. “The rich villages will play an active role in driving the underdeveloped rural areas in China through economic strength and experience,” said Yang Yongzhe, a consultant to the association. But many of them also face a change of development mode from relying on labor-intensive or steel and chemical industries to developing high-tech industries, Yang said. The bond sale is part of a planned 1.55 trillion yuan basket the ministry will sell to purchase $200 billion of foreign exchange from the central bank for the funding of China Investment Corporate, a state-owned foreign exchange investment firm launched in September to better use the country’s huge foreign exchange reserves.
At the end of August, the ministry issued 600 billion yuan of special treasury bonds targeting the country’s commercial banks with an annual interest rate of 4.3 percent. The ministry announced on Sept. 10 it would issue 200 billion yuan of special treasury bonds to the general public. A total of 103.38 billion yuan of such bonds have already been made available to the public in three batches. The bond sale is meant to help ease liquidity, prevent the economy from overheating and strengthen the macro-control policy, according to the ministry. In theory, a 200-billion-yuan bond sale to the public could have the same effect on excess liquidity as an 0.5-percentage-point rise in bank reserve requirements, said Wang Guogang, a financial expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.—Xinhua