From Xinhua:

A modern and booming city that one sees through a glimpse of Beijing is featured by skyscrapers overlooking streets of overparked cars with multicolored lights lit up the city at the night.

But here in the quiet Nangangzi Village of neighboring Hebei Province, only 15 kilometers from Beijing’s boundary, the 74-year-old Zhang Jianzhi seems to live in a different world.

Zhang’s family lives in a three-roomed earthen house built about four decades ago equipped with only one 15-watt light for cutting their expenses. A cooking stove stands at the middle of the leading room of their house and the two other bedrooms each has an adobe “kang,” or heatable earthen sleeping platform, with shabby, worn-out beddings. A date wood cabinet, the sole furniture of the family, which fades with the times, stands in one of the bedrooms.

A dirt, muddy road is still the only route leading the village to the outside world.