With only six years of primary school education, 70-year-old Chang Desheng, as Party secretary of a small village in East China's Jiangsu province, knew even in the early 1980s that agricultural production could never be abandoned however rich his village became and was also aware that polluting factories were not acceptable however profitable they might be.

His village, Jiangxiang, with per capita annual GDP of more than $20,000 in past decade, does not have to buy grain and vegetables and has all its sewage and solid waste treated before being discharged.

Traveling around the 3-square-kilometer village and witnessing with my own eyes the tidy two-story houses for every family, the zigzagging waterways with clean water and the green fields with birds of different kinds singing nearby, I couldn't help thinking how such an ordinary village Party secretary could have embraced sustainable development even in the 1980s when the country was still in the early stage of its economic reform and opening-up.