Pulling down his shirt sleeves and dusting his trousers after coming in from the field, Xia Jiandong said he'd rather live in his own rural village than in any city.

"It's freer and more convenient to live in the countryside. I don't see any advantage to living in the city," said the 42-year-old farmer from Juqiao Village in the vicinity of Zhangjiagang City, a booming port on the Yangtze River in East China's Jiangsu Province.

He has an annual income over 10,000 yuan ($1,205) and a two-storey house with polished wooden floors, carpets soft wall panelling, a telephone and a bathroom on each floor. This is enough to make him the envy of most city dwellers, who are caged in small apartments and jammed in thick traffic every day. His annual income is nearly twice as much as that of an average city dweller in China.

Xia Jiandong is typical of a new class of farmers emerging from China's rural population of 900 million during the country's current modernization drive.

Employed by an assortment of township, village or privately owned enterprises in ever-increasing numbers, these farmers have changed their life-styles so drastically that they have been identified by agro-economists and commonly recognized by the urban population as a new class of farmer-workers.

"Farmers experienced the first agricultural revolution in the late 1970s when the land was distributed under the family-contracting system. Now they are going through the second agricultural revolution of large-scale, collective farming, which is coming as the rural areas enjoy increasing economic strength," said Gu Zefen, Vice-Secretary of the local Communist Party Committee in Zhangjiagang.

While Jiangsu Province aspires to realize a comfortable life for its people by the year 2010, ambitious Zhangjiagang vows to reach that goal by the end of this century. The elimination of the urban-rural difference is one of the aims of Zhangjiagang, Gu said.

She said a modernized countryside should not be judged only by the increase in farmers' income, but by the quality of life, which includes upgrading living facilities as well as improving the social and cultural environment.

Juqiao Village has become a good model for the urbanization of rural villages.

Except for the fact that they do farm work and their rural residence registration identifies them as farmers, there's nothing to distinguish Xia and his fellow villagers from city dwellers as they walk down the street.

Their daily lives are not much different either. Xia Jiandong goes to work in a textile factory at 7:15 every morning, has an hour lunch break, and leaves at 5:00 in the afternoon.

The major difference is that after work he continues to farm his one-fifth acre of land, which will yield the grain that sustains his family of four his mother, wife and daughter for the next year. During the busiest times in the farming season, such as sowing and harvest, he and his fellow workers take turns in the fields.

The emergence of such a pattern can be traced to the late 1970s, when China started economic reforms and adopted the policy of opening to the outside world, and encouraged the development of collective or private business and rural industries. The drastic change in the national policy soon led to a surge of small factories in the villages.

Juqiao Village, where Xia Jiandong lives, is one of many that prospered quickly in southern Jiangsu Province, traditionally a hotbed of small business activity.

As early as the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, the village was quietly running a small wool-processing factory.

Reforms brought forth a family-contracting system and put distribution of the collectively owned commune land into the hands of farmers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Xia and his fellow villagers in this area, long known for their diligence and shrewdness, welcomed the changes wholeheartedly.

As the farmers became owners of land in the real sense, their long-suppressed energy erupted. The '80s witnessed an amazing increase in the total grain output as well as a boom in private business and family factories in rural areas.

However, the small-scale farming by each household tended to obstruct the utilization of agricultural machinery and hinder the further increase of productivity.

In the late '80s Xia's village committee re-collected the land and developed large-scale agriculture. Taking advantage of advanced agro-technology, improved seeds, chemical fertilizers and farm machinery, only 18 farmers in the village are required to manage and cultivate the 500 mu (82.4 acres) of collectively-owned land. Over the past few years production has jumped from about 5,345 pounds per acre to 9,020 pounds per acre.

And the rest of its 1,000-strong work force became contracted workers with the village's 13 factories producing textiles, chemicals, machinery and medical equipment. According to Zhu Shizhong, 45, chairman of the village committee, the total output of the 13 factories last year exceeded 300 million yuan ($36 million), and the average income of a worker exceeded 5,000 yuan ($600), four times the average farmer's income in the country.

Reflecting on the course of assembly of land by the establishment of communes in the 1950s, the disassembly in the late 1970s and the re-assembly in the early '90s, Zhu Shizhong said the change was consistent with the social and economic progress in China.

He explained that the distribution of land in the late '70s stimulated the enthusiasm of farmers and succeeded in increasing agricultural output, while in the early '90s the financial strength of village and township enterprises provided a solid base for the development of large-scale agriculture.

"Agriculture is a long-term, high-return investment," said the village head. "We are now investing in the happiness of our offspring."

At a time when the family-contract system is popular in China, visitors to Juqiao Village may be surprised to find such a strong collective leadership.

Quite interestingly, villagers of Juqiao realized the historic drama. They said that without the village's collective leadership they could not have the good life they are living now.

"If I open my own business, I will certainly earn much more. But there will be no road built to my house, that's for sure," said Xia Jiandong.

Indeed, Juqiao Village is like a fairy tale in its contrast to the common image of shabby cottages, muddy roads and dirty yards packed with straw and running with chickens in books, novels, films and documentaries featuring Chinese villages.

Every house in Juqiao Village is a two-storey building, equipped with electricity, running water, a gas stove, cable television and a domestic direct-dial telephone line that is usually linked to two telephone sets.

Built under the supervision of the village committee, the buildings are of similar styles and sizes and are largely concentrated in one area so that concrete roads in the village connect conveniently with the nearby main road. The village has its own kindergarten, a primary school, a clinic with four doctors, a recreation centre, a hotel and a bus shuttling between the village and the city centre four times a day.

The elderly villagers are entitled to a monthly pension of 100 yuan ($12). Villagers can have 70 per cent of their medical bills reimbursed. And those who attend primary school, high school or vocational school and college are awarded 300,500 and 1,000 yuan ($36 to $120) respectively every year.

"This is the best life I've lived all my life," said 72-year-old Zhang Zhongfu.

He recalled that in the 1950s their ideal of an ultimate happy life was described as "electric lamps and telephones downstairs and upstairs." Now their dream has come true.

But the village committee does not seen an end to local development and is drawing a bigger blueprint for the village's future development.

Zhu Shizhong said that the village would be divided into six areas agricultural, industrial, sideline products, residential, recreation and commercial.

"Then our village will become a small town on its own," said the ambitious farmer-entrepreneur.