China has 1.33 billion square meters of dangerous rural dwellings in need of renovation or demolition due to their age or state of disrepair, housing officials said.

By the end of 2008, China had a total of 27.8 billion sq m of rural dwellings -- about 2.3 times the size of those in urban areas, Li Bingdi, deputy head of the Chinese Society for Urban Studies, said on Wednesday at a forum on human settlement in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province.

From 1990 to 2008, 3.38 trillion yuan (US$507 billion) was invested on rural dwellings, with 11.3 billion sq m of new-build houses.

"About half of the country's 175 million peasant households moved into new-build homes during that period," said Li, who is also a former director of the rural development department for the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

In 2008, the average per capita living space in rural areas reached 32.42 sq m, 12 sq m more than in 1990.

Improving rural living conditions nevertheless remains a continuing challenge in China, where 20 million rural inhabitants currently live in poverty, most of them in dangerous houses built of adobe or mud and grass.

At the same time, there are about 1.33 billion sq m of dangerous rural dwellings waiting to be renovated or reconstructed.

It is a practice in China for rural residents to raise the capital to fund building their own homes after the government provides them with a housing site.

In 2009, the central government provided 4 billion yuan in subsidies for the country's 800,000 poor rural households to renovate their homes, official figures show.

"Over the next five years, the government plans to provide subsidies for 15 million rural households to build 2 billion sq m of new houses," Li said.

Another 60 million poor rural households will receive government funds to renovate the dangerous dwellings in which they reside, he added.

The country is determined to give budget priority to peasants in order to improve their living conditions, according to this year's "No 1 Central Document" issued in February by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council.

The government began a pilot project in September in which discounted, high-quality cement products were made available to families in rural areas to encourage them to build or renovate their houses in Shandong province and the Ningxia Hui autonomous region.

"Along with dwellings, the government should give financial support to building up the infrastructure in rural areas, such as the construction of roads and waste treatment facilities, as well as setting up cultural centers for entertainment in villages," said Lu Bu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

(China Daily December 3, 2010)