China is demolishing villages and forcing people into bigger ones

IN THE PAST 30 years tens of millions of Chinese farmers have moved to cities to work. While these have boomed, villages have hollowed out. Often the elderly share them with the children left in their care. Houses lie empty. With too few pupils, many rural schools have closed, forcing children to trek long distances daily or attend often grim state-run boarding schools.Many provinces have devised a remedy for this malaise. It involves knocking down villages and building new, bigger ones, to accommodate the residents of several scattered hamlets. The land where demolished houses stood can then be ploughed up and sown with crops—a boon for a country that has one-fifth of the world’s population but less than one-tenth of its arable land.