Tengtou: Eco Choice Champion

By staff reporter GONG HAN

Tengtou has been selected as the only village to have an exhibit in the Urban Best Practices Area of Shanghai Expo. This eco-friendly pacesetter is a tiny two-square-kilometer settlement tucked away in the juristiction of Fenghua, Ningbo City in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province. Now it’s famous for its distinctive, eco-friendly development model.

A wall of the Tengtou Pavilion is built with bamboos, and some others with 500,000 brick fragments. Yu Xiangjun

A Common Understanding

Tengtou didn’t drag its feet on ecological protection practices for a start; they were initiated as early as the 1980s when the reform and opening-up drive was launched. The concept of “ecological protection” was still a new thing then, while “getting rich” was the more common preoccupation with Chinese people. Tengtou villagers shared the same ambition, largely because their home province is Zhejiang, where a business and money-making tradition has strong roots.

In the mid-1980s, a foreign investor wanted to build a pulp and paper mill in the village, which promised an astounding annual net profit of over RMB 1 million. What should have been good news was rejected by Fu Qiping, then Party Secretary of Tengtou, on the grounds it was likely to create significant pollution into the bargain. Fu sought out an environmental specialist to screen a documentary about the environment for the villagers. For the first time locals realized how pollution and mismanagement of Earth’s resources had set the stage for future environmental disasters. From that moment on all the villagers reached a common understanding on environmental protection, and the decision to give up the pulp and paper project was unanimous.

In 1993 an environmental protection committee was set up in Tengtou – the first village-level environmental organization in China – to monitor investments. It bravely adopted a one-vote veto process. Over the years the committee has rejected more than 50 projects that offered high economic returns but threatened ecological destruction or compromise.

The village authority has earmarked an annual fund for ecological conservation, which grows by no less than 20 percent every year. Little things are seen to matter: in the village today, wind and solar powered street lamps have been installed along one third of its roads; all the residential communities are equipped with solar water heating systems with which more than 50,000 KWH of electricity is saved per year. There are also two eco-friendly toilets constructed where captured rainwater is stored, saving about 9,500 tons of water every year.

The local air quality monitoring station features an electronic board on which the local temperature, humidity and air quality are shown. A local official told China Today that he hopes the figures on the board remind every inhabitant of the importance of environmental conservation.

In Tengtou’s residential areas rainwater and sewage have been managed separately. The village’s waste is disposed of or treated through the urban garbage and sewage system in nearby Fenghua City, using processes designed to render it harmless. Many villagers told China Today that for some years now they have been gradually cultivating the habits of reusing water, carrying fabric shopping bags instead of plastic ones and hand-washing their clothes for the sake of environmental protection.

The Right Thing and the Smart Thing

That Tengtou is not blessed with favorable natural conditions may be raising its inhabitants’ consciousness too. Its low altitude and accompanying rainfall means its farmland is often a bog. Barely making any profit from farming, most villagers simply neglected the land. To better utilize it, the village authority bought the land from villagers for RMB 550 per mu (one mu equals one-fifteenth of one hectare), and in 1986 helped the village found an agricultural company in a bid to develop industrial agriculture.

First, they tried on “three-dimensional eco-farming” based on the theory of biological chaining. Villagers built a three-layer framework, with the upper layer for grape cultivation, the middle for bird breeding, and the lowest for raising fish. The logic was the upper vines sheltered the area from heat and sunlight; the fallen grapes served as food for birds and worms, and the birds’ waste fed the fish.

Officials from the UN showed interest in such a model during their visit to Tengtou and they praised the locals’ efforts to advance ecological agriculture. After a comprehensive assessment, UN officials granted the Global 500 Award for Environmental Achievement to Tengtou, a great honor viewed with much pride by the locals.

Second, the Tengtou village committee launched projects in cooperation with universities and research institutions to adopt advanced technologies and introduce more efficiency to agricultural production. Various bases yielding fruit, vegetables, flowers, seedlings and plant tissue have been established.

Since the late 1990s, the increasing demand for decorative flowers and plants in urban areas has given a big boost to Tengtou’s economy. So much so in fact, that the local land resources couldn’t meet the demands of business expansion. Individual villagers went out to set up plantations in 20-odd other provinces and cities. In 2008 Tengtou conducted business worth RMB 30 million to provide flowers and plants for the Beijing Olympic Games. This year it is responsible for providing 100,000 tree seedlings for the Shanghai Expo.

Eco Friendly Pays

The plantations have also become a tourist attraction. As of 1999, the village started to sell tickets to visitors, making the village one of the first in the country to sell access to itself. Tourists came for its beautiful flower fields and elegant gardens, students for strawberry-picking adventures and newlyweds for picturesque wedding photos. The revenue from ticket sales in 2009 alone reached RMB 26.3 million, and the comprehensive tourism income totaled nearly RMB 119 million.

Since the Shanghai Expo kicked off, the number of visitors to Tengtou increased by 20 percent compared with the same period last year.

Rural cadres from other parts of the country are attracted to Tengtou to study the model and the experience, something that makes the local leaders feel a little nervous as well as proud. Despite its successful integration of ecological commitments with economic achievements, Fu Deming, chairman of Tengtou Village Federation of Trade Unions, states candidly that there is still much room for Tengtou to improve, both in ecological conservation and technology utilization. He also emphasizes that Tengtou, just like other villages in China, faces challenges in improving village management.

As the only rural examplar at the Shanghai Expo, Tengtou Pavilion is built to mimic Tengtou Village. The pavilion resembles a classic water-town building dating back to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and is surrounded by canals, rice paddies and a bamboo grove. Stepping into the pavilion, visitors are greeted by the voices of nature – croaking frogs, singing birds, babbling water and whinying horses – a peaceful rural soundscape.

In the interests of authentic replication, its black-and-white outer wall was built with over 500,000 one hundred year old (at least) brick fragments, collected in half a year from villages in Xiangshan, Yinzhou and Fenghua.

In the center of the pavilion there is a green paddy field, with strawberries planted in the corner. Visitors could be forgiven for thinking that they are enjoying a leisurely existence in the land of bounty. A staff member at the pavilion told China Today that he hopes every visitor to the Tengtou Pavilion will be convinced of its theme and slogan: “Rural life is more attractive to urbanites.”