Building a Beautiful Countryside

“Building a beautiful countryside” is one of the historic tasks during China’s modernization process, which has been written into the proposal of the “11^th Five-Year Plan” from 2006 to 2010, as part of the strategy of new socialist countryside construction. It not only refers to improving the environmental quality and infrastructure facilities of rural settlements, but also implies the structural transformations from restructuring agricultural production to increasing farmers’ incomes, and from mobilizing farmers’ enthusiasm to constructing rural policies. In the field of village planning, building a beautiful countryside becomes a powerful driving force for exploring innovations on planning investigation methods, spatial arrangement, local feature conservation, public participation, etc. Thus, projects of beautiful countryside construction have been carried out in many Chinese provinces in recent years, such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Sichuan.