Five years ago, Qiu Liqin traveled from a small village in east China's Zhejiang Province to the United Nations headquarters in New York to receive the highest environmental honor.

"This is the best moment in my life," Qiu Liqin, a village delegate from the province, said when receiving the Champions of the Earth Award for Zhejiang's Green Rural Revival Program on September 27, 2018.

Launched in 2003, the program celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. It aims to renovate about 10,000 incorporated villages and transform about 1,000 central villages into examples of moderate prosperity to improve the rural ecological environment and improve villagers' quality of life.

Qiu's hometown, Lujia Village in Anji County, is part of the program. She witnessed the village's huge transformation over the past decade and described it as a story of turning the tables.

Today's beautiful village was once a reeking squalor.

Fifteen years ago, there was not a dustbin in the whole village. The villagers had no choice but to dump their garbage into rivers, leading to heavy pollution of the rivers. But now, the rivers are very clear after decades of effort to improve the ecological environment.

Lujia Village used to be a village with no distinctive industries, but by creating family farms and rural tourism, the ordinary village has turned into a national model village.

The environment has improved, and so has the quality of life of the villagers. The per capita annual income of the villagers increased from 14,719 yuan (about $2,035)  in 2011 to 42,710 yuan in 2019.

Lujia Village is just one of the many villages benefiting from Zhejiang's Green Rural Revival Program.

Back in 2003, the environment in Xiajiang Village, Chun'an County was quite worrying. Every family in the village kept pigs and cattle, and dirty water was everywhere. It made the Fenglingang River in the upper reaches of Qiandao Lake, an important drinking source, fetid. What's more, the villagers cut down trees and bamboo for fires, leaving the mountains bare.

When the program started, the village began to build biogas digesters, structures that transform organic waste into cooking gas, to improve the ecological environment.

"The water in Qiandao Lake won't be so clear, and we cannot have the clear drinking water without carrying out the program," said Jiang Yinxiang, a former Party branch secretary of the village.

In 2003, there were many villages with serious environmental problems in Zhejiang. Of the 34,000 villages in the province, 30,000 had poor environmental conditions.

Over the past 20 years, the program has changed thousands of villages in the province.

Nowadays, 90 percent of the villages in the province meet the national standard for a beautiful village in the new era. The rural living environment in the province continues to lead the country, with the forest coverage rate exceeding 61 percent and the per capita income of rural residents ranking first in the country for 20 consecutive years.

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