BEIJING, July 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The following article was published today by China Daily.
China has made a solid start in its county-level campaign to build a beautiful countryside, with rural environments improving and green agricultural development advancing steadily, according to a think tank report published on Monday.
The report, titled Progress and Achievements in Building Beautiful Countryside in China, was compiled by the Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization, China Daily and China Environment News.
It said that after the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and eight other national government bodies released an implementation plan for promoting the beautiful countryside initiative in early 2025, China has stepped up coordinated efforts to improve rural living environments, promote low-carbon agriculture and strengthen long-term governance mechanisms.
The plan set out four major tasks and 18 measures, with the goal of raising the proportion of counties that have realized the beautiful countryside initiative to 40 percent by 2027 and essentially accomplishing the program by 2035, the report said.
In order to meet the requirements of the initiative, counties must have good public infrastructure such as roads, public lighting and green spaces, sewage and wastewater treatment facilities, and age-friendly renovations.
By 2025, the national rural domestic sewage treatment rate had reached 55 percent, more than double the level at the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) period, it said. More than 5,000 large black and odorous rural water bodies on people’s doorstep had been basically eliminated, with the treatment rate exceeding 98 percent.
The report said the campaign had benefited some 9.72 million people across 30 provincial-level regions, 860 counties and more than 4,100 administrative villages. It also noted that remediated water bodies were checked through unannounced inspections, remote sensing and water quality monitoring.
Rural waste collection and disposal systems have also been improved. The report said the proportion of administrative villages covered by systems in which villages collect waste, townships transfer it and counties process it has remained above 90 percent.
Green agricultural development has gained momentum, it said. The comprehensive utilization rate of livestock and poultry manure reached 80.1 percent in 2025, while the comprehensive utilization rate of crop straw stayed above 88 percent. The disposal rate of agricultural film exceeded 85 percent, helping curb plastic pollution in key farming areas.
The report also highlighted progress in soil and water conservation. In 2025, China treated 11,500 square kilometers of soil erosion, restored 4,666 erosion gullies in the fertile black soil region of Northeast China and built 634 ecologically clean small watersheds. The national soil and water conservation rate reached 73.09 percent.
County-level implementation has become a key feature of the campaign, the report said. So far, 600 agricultural county-level areas have completed the beautiful countryside initiative, bringing the national completion rate to 20.9 percent. Twenty-three key counties have been selected as pilot areas under the Beautiful China initiative.
The report said public participation and assessment mechanisms are being strengthened. More than 4,000 sites have been evaluated, some 45,000 villagers interviewed and public satisfaction has reached more than 90 percent. Authorities have also handled over 2,300 public complaints through a closed-loop mechanism covering clue collection, data analysis, supervision and rectification.
It said beautiful countryside construction is an important part of China’s rural vitalization strategy and Beautiful China initiative, helping shift villages from being merely clean and orderly toward being ecologically livable.
China is set to continue to improve rural environmental governance, promote green and low-carbon agriculture, enhance village appearance and strengthen farmer participation, the report said. The country will also work toward raising the county-level completion rate to 55 percent by the end of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period and basically completing the beautiful countryside initiative by 2035.
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SOURCE China Daily
