Big trouble in rural China?

With the “eco-village” of Huangbaiyu in northern China scheduled to be built, and with a handful of other Chinese cities awaiting his Cradle-to-Cradle design imprimatur for new development, William McDonough told this magazine exactly one year ago: “China is our most ambitious project yet.”

Yet by spring 2006, McDonough’s partnership work on Huangbaiyu with the Portland-based China U.S. Center for Sustainable Development (CUCSD) is at what a McDonough spokesperson calls “a less than opportune moment for additional coverage.”

CUCSD senior program manager Rory Schmick also declined to talk to SIJ about the current status of work at Huangbaiyu, saying that it was not the right time. And University of California at Berkeley PhD candidate Shannon May, who’s been living in the village since May 2005 and has written the draft of her dissertation on the development effort there, says McDonough’s reading of her work has led to “a complete circling of the wagons” by the partners. Instead of being a demonstration model for sustainable growth ready to be replicated throughout the country, Huangbaiyu appears to be a village in limbo.

In the old village districts of Huangbaiyu, many farmers subsidize their yearly harvest earnings with small flocks of sheep, backyard gardens and trout aquaculture. Meanwhile, the new village’s neat rows of 42 eco-dwellings — outfitted with rooftop solar panels, radiant heat floors and pipes for methane heating and cooking fuel from a nearby biomass gasification plant — currently sit empty. No villagers have yet agreed to cash in their old homesteads in order to purchase the comfort of a McDonough-designed bungalow.

The village was cherry-picked by CUCSD and McDonough as an ideal site for demonstrating to the world how China, in its mad rush into industrialized wealth, could build with sustainability in mind. Resettling 400 Huangbaiyu families to McDonough’s hay-bale bungalows was meant to raise living standards, reduce coal-burning emissions, as well as consolidate housing in a compact region so more of the village’s land could be turned into arable hectares — a major goal of the Chinese government.

McDonough designed the houses to cost around $3,000 (U.S.), but the move-in price is now estimated by local developer Dai Xialong and the CUCSD to top $5,000.

Technical expertise for the flagship Huangbaiyu project was donated by companies such as BP, a multinational producer of rooftop solar panels.

Village residents are considered to be among China’s “have-nots.” Rigorous efforts were made to design the new village with local resources and local residents in mind. But potential income villagers could lose if they lived suddenly only meters apart with no provision for sheep pens and vegetable gardens did not appear to be part of the planners’ initial calculations.