JIAXING, China, Sept. 24, 2021 /Xinhua-AsiaNet/– The major celebration of the fourth “Chinese Farmers’ Harvest Festival” was held in Nanhu District of Jiaxing city, east China’s Zhejiang Province, on Sept. 23, which falls on the Autumn Equinox, one of the 24 solar terms in the Chinese lunar calendar, according to Nanhu District Media Center.

Starting in 2018, the Chinese farmers’ harvest festival coincides with the autumnal equinox each year and is mainly celebrated with performances and farming contests.

Map of fish-shaped rice fields in Nanhu District, Jiaxing

This year marks the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which will be highlighted during the festival’s celebration in Jiaxing. A series of distinctive and diverse harvest activities will be carried out to celebrate harvest and pay tribute to the CPC’s leadership.

Digital empowerment is one of the key words of the festival’s celebration in Jiaxing. Offline display, field operation, introductory video and system demonstration will be used to showcase new achievements of smart agriculture and digital village development in China, especially in Zhejiang Province.

Jiaxing will take this harvest festival as an opportunity to display the idyll of the new era, revive and upgrade the agricultural culture and create world-class picturesque destination, according to Zhang Bing, secretary of the CPC Jiaxing Municipal Committee.

Jiaxing seeks to build a high-quality rural revitalization demonstration area, and further enhance the pride and happiness of rural and agriculture people. Efforts will be pooled across the city to promote rural revitalization and build a model city of common prosperity, Zhang added.

Located in the hinterland of China’s Yangtze River Delta, Jiaxing is one of the earliest rice planting areas in the world, with the fame of a land of milk and honey and a silk hub. Since 1978, Jiaxing has been following the path of balancing urban and rural development and prioritized development of agriculture and rural areas, becoming one of the cities with the highest degree of urban-rural integration in China.

Jiaxing’s urbanization rate topped 70 percent, and its per capita disposable income of rural residents is one of the highest in China. Urban and rural residents enjoy a unified basic medical insurance, enabling a local citizen to enjoy medical insurance services across the Yangtze River Delta.

Walking on the road of Lianfeng Village, Fengqiao Town, Jiaxing’s Nanhu District, one can see clear rivers along with green grass and flowers on one side, and simple and tidy farmhouses on the other.

“Just over a decade ago, our village was still dominated by traditional planting and aquaculture, with low output and heavy pollution; Nowadays, the environment in the village has improved and the industry has been transformed,” said Li Zhengfeng, head of Lianfeng Village. The village also set up a tourism media company. Last year, the village collective income reached 2.16 million yuan, and the per capita income was nearly 40,000 yuan.

Following the rural revitalization strategy, Nanhu District has implemented the quality improvement plan in the central city to turn the whole region into a scenic place. In the push, the district has transformed 390 old communities and alleys. Efforts have been made to build beautiful countryside and beautiful  towns and develop a number of 3A-level scenic villages and characteristic village tourism brands. With the integrated development of agriculture and tourism, villages are turned into happy homes for farmers and leisure parks for citizens to increase local income and inject vitality into rural revitalization. In 2020, village tourism in Nanhu District received more than 520,000 visits with a total income of about 30 million yuan.

Moreover, as the permanent venue of the World Internet Conference, Jiaxing has well followed the layout of the rural revitalization strategy and top project of digital economy development to further digitalize agriculture and rural affairs management.

In June this year, Xiangjiadang agricultural digital factory with a total investment of 60 million yuan was completed in Nanhu Agricultural Economic Development Zone.

The factory uses a number of modern agricultural technologies to make the development of agricultural production and management more industrialized, standardized, digitalized and integrated with finance.

alking into the factory’s whitish intelligent greenhouse is like entering the purification workshop as one cannot find any soil, but only the crops growing vertically under the automatic fill lights. The temperature, light, water, gas and fertilizer required by crops are all collected by intelligent sensors, and a scientific real-time management scheme is formed through background big data analysis, thus realizing a complete set of smart control.

The annual output value of Xiangjiadang agricultural digital factory is expected to reach more than 10 million yuan. It can provide one million kilograms of high-quality fresh green vegetables for the local people every year, offering technical jobs to over 500 farmers.

Jiaxing is one of the key landmarks of China’s revolutionary course. In the summer of 1921, the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in Shanghai was urgently transferred to a small boat in Nanhu Lake of Jiaxing, and all the agenda of the congress was completed on board. Nanhu Lake in Jiaxing has become the place where the Chinese revolution’s leading body set sail.

Source: Nanhu District Media Center, Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province

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