Ningbo's pursuit of common prosperity in recent years has resulted in robust rural development.

The city in East China's Zhejiang province is currently leading the nation in terms of agricultural modernization. The added value of its agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery industries hit 37.25 billion yuan ($5.73 billion) in 2021, according to Li Bin, head of the Ningbo municipal bureau of agriculture and rural affairs, who detailed Ningbo's rural development at a news conference on Oct 12.

In 2021, the city's agricultural mechanization rate was 83.3 percent, and the comprehensive mechanization level of rice farming and harvesting was 91.5 percent, the highest in Zhejiang.

In addition, its agricultural labor productivity reached 83,000 yuan per person, ranking second in the province.

Ningbo, which is included in a national pilot program for the reform of rural collective property rights system, has also been spearheading rural reform in the province. Xiangshan county, which is administered by the city, has also been designated a national test bed for rural homestead system reform.

The income level of local rural residents is significantly higher than the national average. In 2021, the per capita disposable income of Ningbo's rural residents rose by 9.7 percent year-on-year to 42,946 yuan. In the first half of this year, the average annual income of the city's farmers was 25,292 yuan, the second highest in Zhejiang.

Furthermore, Ningbo has posted outstanding performances in urban-rural integrated development.

In 2021, the city's urbanization rate reached 78.4 percent, higher than the national and provincial averages which stood at 63.9 percent and 72.7 percent respectively, and the income gap between urban and rural residents narrowed to 1.72 versus the national average of 2.5. This was the 17th consecutive year the city's urban-rural income gap had narrowed.

According to an action plan unveiled by the local government to boost common prosperity, Ningbo aims to increase village-level collective economic income to more than 10 billion yuan, raise rural residents' per capita disposable income to 60,000 yuan and reduce the urban-rural income ratio to less than 1.7 by 2025.

In June 2021, the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, China's Cabinet, unveiled a guideline to build Zhejiang into a demonstration zone for common prosperity. According to the guideline, the province will achieve this goal and see its per capita GDP and the incomes of urban and rural residents reach the standards of developed countries by 2035.