Tourists enjoy drifting at Yucun village, Zhejiang province. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Zhejiang village a successful model of President Xi's 'Two Mountains' theory

The 30,000-square-meter quarry in Yucun village, Zhejiang province, was often bemoaned as a "scar" by local residents, a reminder of the village's reckless pursuit of economic growth from mining in the 1990s.

But village director Yu Xiaoping and his predecessors had a vision of turning the quarry into a landmark, appealing to a growing number of tourists as an unusual landscape with an interesting history.

Sitting at the foot of Tianmu Mountain, famous for bamboo forests towering to dizzying heights, Yucun in Anji county was once renowned for its strong economic development derived from its natural resources. At its peak in the mid-1990s, the remote village with a population of only 1,000 people in 280 households, boasted an average annual per capita income of 3,000 yuan ($434), nearly the equivalent of the provincial capital Hangzhou.

But environmental protection had been sacrificed at the altar of economic growth. By the end of the millennium, pollution was so pervasive that villagers ignored the weather forecasts, as "the sky was always gray regardless of whether it was sunny or cloudy".

In 2003, the village director decided to put a halt to reliance on the "stone economy" - three mining companies and a cement factory that contributed 95 percent of the village's income.

Two years later, President Xi Jinping, then Party secretary of Zhejiang province, praised the decision during an inspection trip to the village and said "clear waters and green mountains are as good as mountains of gold and silver". Known as the "Two Mountains" theory, the dialectic notion has since proved an important guide for both rural and urban areas in China, as the country seeks high-quality economic growth and undertakes its global commitments on ecological protection and development.