What Makes a Home: 'Low-Barrier' Settlement Experiment of a Small Town in Central Zhejiang

Between Jinhua and Yiwu, in the middle of Zhejiang Province, a small town is quietly reshaping how people think about urbanization and the meaning of home. About 30 kilometers from downtown Jinhua and just across the boundary from Yiwu, Fucun Town is home to more than 130,000 permanent residents, making it the most densely populated town in Jindong District. More revealing is its demographic structure: permanent residents far outnumber those with local household registration. Ordinary workers from the countryside of central and western China, drawn here in large numbers, are settling down with their entire families and putting an end to a life of migration. How has this town become a low-barrier destination where people can truly settle?

 I. Valuing Competence over Credentials: Those Willing to Learn and Work Hard Find Decent Jobs

Fucun's primary pull is employment — stable jobs that reward diligence and an eagerness to learn.

The town borders the Yiwu International Trade Market, the world's largest small-commodities hub, less than 20 kilometers away. It maintains an industrial posture of being "close to Yiwu but not inside Yiwu." Drawing on strong trade-driven spillover effects, Fucun has precisely absorbed manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics operations, building a cluster of pillar industries ranging from toys, packaging, and cosmetics to light manufacturing and e-commerce. In the sewing workshop of Jinfeng Toys Co., Ltd., 43-year-old Yang Fen, a worker from Guizhou with only a primary school education, barely knew what an electric sewing machine was when she first arrived. Her mentor told her, "If you're willing to use your head and keep your hands moving, there's nothing you can't learn." She shadowed veteran workers during the day and practiced on scrap material at night. Within a month, she was working independently on the production line. Now a multi-skilled technician, she earns a steady monthly salary of over 6,000 yuan, with meals and accommodation provided by the company. "No one asked me about diplomas," she says. "They only asked if I could do the job and whether I was willing to learn. Here, diligence is your greatest asset."

The logistics sector is equally free of educational barriers. Fucun sits at a key node of the Yiwu-Ningbo-Zhoushan open corridor, where Ane Logistics operates a large sorting center. Xiao Yang, a young man from Yunnan who dropped out of high school, drifted between places before joining Ane as a sorter. The company promised "free training and a job you can pick up in half an hour." He spent his spare time learning to drive a forklift and studying warehouse management on his own. Within a year, he obtained a forklift license, becoming a multi-skilled employee proficient in both sorting and forklift operations, and his wages rose accordingly. He has recently begun training new recruits. "They don't look at diplomas; they look at skills," he says. "If you're willing to learn and work hard, you can move up."

Across Fucun's labor landscape — from e-commerce operations to punch-press workers — the vast majority of positions do not impose rigid educational requirements. Instead, "responsibility," "willingness to learn," and "ability to endure hard work" top the list of desired traits. This logic of judging people by ability and assigning positions by diligence has created a credible pathway for ordinary workers from central and western China to change their destiny with their own hands.

II. A Crossroads of Transport: Roads and Rails Redefine the Distance to Home

If employment is the pull, transport is the channel that delivers it. Fucun lies at a highway crossroads in central Zhejiang, granting ordinary workers the convenience of urban integration.

Both the Yongjin and Hangjinqu expressways have interchanges in Fucun. The Jinhua-Yiwu-Dongyang intercity rail line is fully operational: from Fucun, it takes only half an hour to reach the heart of Yiwu and one hour to Dongyang and Hengdian, making a "half-hour metropolitan circle" a daily reality. The planned Jinyi high-speed railway station and a long-term vision for an airport will further boost its hub credentials. Dong, a Henan-born worker employed at a Yiwu trade market stall, has chosen to make his home in Fucun — a half-hour commute lets him escape Yiwu's high living costs while sharing in the big-market job opportunities. On weekends, he can take a high-speed train back to his hometown in two hours. "The sense of distance has shrunk dramatically," he says. "It's nothing like when I worked on the coast years ago, and home felt like it was on the other side of the sky."

Convenient transport eases the psychological burden of leaving one's native place, turning "in-situ urbanization" from a concept into an everyday reality.

III. The Warmth of Everyday Life: A Low-Cost, Decent Existence on the Ground

Settlement ultimately comes down to the texture of daily life. Fucun gives working families their greatest gift: the ability to save money while living with dignity.

The Zhenxing Road and Huajin Street night markets blaze with lights every evening. More than 300 stalls serve flavors from across the country, drawing an average daily footfall of over 13,000. Commercial complexes like Jinyi Powerlong Plaza offer diverse shopping experiences. Education and healthcare are the hard indicators of whether families can truly put down roots. Within a five-kilometer radius, Fucun has four primary schools, four middle schools, and 18 kindergartens, covering every stage of education from preschool to junior high. The town health center, with 21 departments including general medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, allows residents to handle everyday medical needs locally.

An even more immediate reality is the cost of living. While housing prices in downtown Yiwu routinely reach twenty or thirty thousand yuan per square meter, rents and daily expenses in Fucun are markedly lower. A working couple can rent a room with a kitchen and bathroom in a village house for a few hundred yuan a month, and their daily outgoings are far smaller than in the city. Wang Cheng, a forklift operator from Sichuan, has done the math: "It's no trouble for the two of us to save 50,000 yuan a year. That's our capital for turning our lives around."

IV. A Sense of Belonging Rooted in Culture: Respect for Teachers Knows No Origin

Material settlement is only the first step; it is spiritual rooting that truly makes a home. Fucun is the hometown of Ai Qing, a titan of modern Chinese poetry, and the ancestral home of Song Lian, a celebrated scholar-official of the early Ming Dynasty. A tradition of honoring education runs deep. Every year, the Fucun Chamber of Commerce fund rewards outstanding students, but it extends equal reverence to frontline teachers — regardless of their household registration or where they come from, all who teach in Fucun and deliver outstanding results are eligible for the honor. Zhou, a young teacher from Hunan who came to Fucun Central Primary School, initially felt so out of place that she considered leaving. Last year's Teachers' Day, she received an award from the chamber of commerce for her excellent teaching performance. "I thought I would always be an outsider," she says, "but at that moment I understood: Fucun values dedication to teaching and educating, not where you're registered." She has now settled near the school. This respect that asks no questions about origin dissolves the identity alienation of outside teachers, turning them from passers-by into people with a stake in the community. When teachers put down roots, the culture of learning continues to flow through the veins of both old and new residents, and the next generation of migrant families can see a clear channel for upward mobility — precisely the deepest hope of countless ordinary households aiming to bridge the urban-rural divide.

V. Greenery Outside the Window: A Pastoral New Town Dream Within Reach

Fucun has rewritten the tired image of small towns. There is no "dirty, chaotic, and poor" here — only greenery visible through the window and parks right outside the door.

The second phase of Jinyi Central Park is fully open, connecting the Powerlong Plaza commercial area to the north and Jinman Lake Park to the south, with green corridors threading together the landscape of Shuangjian Mountain and Jinman Lake. The new town surrounding Jinman Lake has established an urban skeleton of "two cores and four concentric circles," and scenic spots such as Pear Blossom Island in the provincial-level wetland park have become part of residents' daily routines. An after-dinner walk along the lake, or pitching a tent on the lawn over a weekend, is no longer an unreachable luxury.

VI. What the Town Got Right

Fucun has taken a path strikingly different from that of large cities. Rather than chasing talent with high-salary subsidies, it has seized on the simplest, deepest needs of ordinary workers: jobs to do, money to save, children who can be educated, illness that can be treated, and a life with dignity.

Its experience can be distilled into five approaches. First, it precisely absorbed the industrial spillover from Yiwu, creating a large number of suitable jobs without blindly pursuing the "high-end and fancy." Second, it made moderately ahead-of-time investments in essential public services like education and healthcare. Third, it respected the logic of market pricing, leveraging low housing costs as a core competitive advantage. Fourth, it preserved human warmth, dissolving the sense of estrangement for newcomers through a non-discriminatory cultural atmosphere. Fifth, it built livable surroundings through green development, making the town not just a place to make a living, but a place to live.

VII. Conclusion: Leaving a Low-Barrier Door Open to "Home" for Ordinary People

Over the past decades, China's urbanization narrative has been overwhelmingly focused on big cities. Sky-high housing prices, rigid settlement permit barriers, and fierce job competition have locked vast numbers of ordinary workers outside the gate of true urban citizenship. They have poured their sweat into the cities, yet struggled to light a lamp that truly belongs to them.

Fucun offers an alternative vision. Could there be more small towns like this — places that do not need to blaze with neon lights or cluster Fortune 500 headquarters, but must have plentiful jobs, accessible schools, convenient healthcare, modest prices, smooth transport, and pleasant greenery? More importantly, could they embrace every ordinary person who comes from the land, as long as they are willing to learn and work hard, allowing them to trade their sweat for a stable and secure home?

Fucun's experiment suggests this is no fantasy. When a small town enables ordinary workers to live with dignity and save with hope, it acts as a magnet for the groups overlooked by grand narratives, helping them end a life of drifting. This may well be the most worthwhile direction for the next half of China's urbanization: making every small city and every small town a low-barrier home where ordinary people can truly settle.