"Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets."

Xi Jinping made this remark in 2005 while visiting Anji county in Zhejiang province's Huzhou city, then as the province's Party chief.

Seventeen years later, Huzhou has lived up to Xi's words.

The city has been on a sustainable development path that has led to an improved environment, greener industries and wealthier residents, noted Huzhou's Party Chief Chen Hao, who is a delegate to the ongoing 20th CPC National Congress.

In an exclusive interview with China Daily, Chen shared facts and figures to show how his city has significantly transformed over the years.

To optimize its industrial structure, it rolled out a campaign in recent years targeting the cement, printing and dyeing, storage battery and glass industries, he said. The campaign saw 16,600 companies with poor environmental performances either shut down, suspend operations, merge with other enterprises or start manufacturing new products, reducing the annual energy consumption in the city by 738,900 metric tons of standard coal.

Despite the campaign, Huzhou has experienced sustained economic growth and increases in people's incomes, he said.

Last year, the city's GDP reached 364.5 billion yuan ($50.7 billion), compared with 166.4 billion yuan in 2012, he said. The per capita disposable income of its urban residents stood at 67,983 yuan in 2021, more than double 2012's figure.

Following an increase of 140 percent from the 2012 level, the per capita disposable income of rural residents in Huzhou shot up to 41,303 yuan, Chen said, adding that the rural-urban income gap in the city has narrowed.

The lucid waters and lush mountains in rural Huzhou are one of the reasons for the shrinking gap, according to Chen.

Many rural residents, for instance, have been benefiting from a Liangshan Bank program that was launched to maximize the value of the environment they have helped conserve.

Liangshan Bank, which literally means "the bank of two mountains", gets its name from the Chinese translation of "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets". It acts as a platform to integrate green resources, such as forests, wetland and rural houses, and transform them into assets with developmental value.

Chen said that by using 58,000 hectares of bamboo forest as a carbon sink to trade, the bank program in Anji county can help the landowners earn an extra income of roughly 14.6 million yuan a year.

To date, there have been 23 platform companies under the Liangshan Bank mechanism in Huzhou, he said, which have collected 1,600 hectares of farmland left idle by their owners, along with nearly 58,700 hectares of forest and 378 rural houses.

In total, these companies have helped villages increase their incomes by 30 million yuan, he added.

The official also cited a saying that has become popular among natives to describe the great benefits rural residents have enjoyed from tourism development as Huzhou strives to construct beautiful cities, townships and villages as a whole, which literally goes: "A bed in the mountain dwarfs an urban house."

Thanks to the city's efforts to develop rural tourism programs such as high-end rural resorts and agritourism, the city last year saw almost 43.4 million tourists stay overnight in the city and the total revenue from tourism reach 129 billion yuan.

"A bed in Moganshan can even annually contribute tax revenue of over 120,000 yuan," he said.

Moganshan is a popular leisure tourism and summer resort in Huzhou's Deqing county.

Chen also noted significant progress in the city's efforts to raise the value of farm produce by enhancing quality control and exploring the brand value of Huzhou as the place where the assertion of "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets" was first proposed.

Under the Liangshan farm produce collection brand, the city has opened stores to sell many of its eco-agricultural products such as tea, freshwater fish and rice in key cities in the Yangtze River Delta, he said. The program has benefited almost 70,000 rural households and has helped increase income from these farm produce by over 10 percent.

The over 13,000 hectares of Anji white tea in the city alone can bring an annual output value of 3.1 billion yuan, he said.

While phasing out enterprises with poor environmental performances, Huzhou has also been making efforts to introduce green and low-carbon industries, according to Chen.

A new energy vehicle project of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, China's largest private carmaker, has been put into operation in the city, with a total investment of 32.6 billion yuan, he said.

The city has so far brought in about 400 companies that concentrate on geographical information, he said. Following consistent growth over the past six years, a geographical information town in the city has seen its revenue climb to 26 billion yuan.