Shaking off poverty - story of a small Chinese village

NANNING (Xinhua)

Thirty-one years ago, Yang Liuyan tried to run away from her husband the very day they got married. Now, she has settled down in peace and her family is building a new home, a two-storied building with a floor space of 200 square meters, close to a highway linking her village with the outside world. Standing in front of her two-storied home, which is near completion, 56-year-old Yang looks light-hearted and happy.

"Things are totally different than they were 30 years ago," said Yang, a villager in the Changdong Village of Fengcheng Town in Fengshan county, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region. "I wanted to move out of the mountainous village immediately after I began my marriage," said Yang, whose parents lived in a nearby village. "Local people lived such a poor life. There were stones everywhere." Yang recalled that she and her husband lived in a shabby tile-roofed house and had to walk several kilometres to get drinking water in the early morning and three kilometres on a rugged mountain road to work. These conditions are not rare in southwest China, where villages like Changdong are surrounded by high mountains and are extremely short of water.

"It was not an easy thing to move out of the place since there was no road leading to the outside," said He Shichang, the village head. By 1985, the village had its first dirt road built. Before that, Changdong villagers had to walk for four hours to the county town of Fengshan. Many may never have left their remote village. Dissatisfied with life in her village, Yang attempted to steal away one night with her children but was found by her husband and was brought back. Life remained dull and uncomfortable in the village in the early 1990s. Many villagers lived by farming wild herbs, and were short of daily necessities. With four children, it became more difficult for she and her husband to make ends meet. The six-member family only had an annual income of 2,000 yuan (about 241 US dollars).

Their situation did not improve until the late '90s, when the poverty reduction program launched by the Chinese government was introduced in the small village. The government invested 1.39 million yuan (about 160,000 US dollars) in building ponds to store rain water, clinics, methane pits and projects to return reclaimed land to forest. Guangdong Province, an economic power house in south China, funded a new primary school for the village and locals for the first time used electricity in their daily lives in 1999. He, the village head, said, "When the first TV set arrived at the village, everybody came to watch."

Since the beginning of the new century, many places in China have embarked on the road to building an affluent society, a target set by the Chinese government with the purpose of enabling all Chinese people to live well. Changdong village has begun to benefit from the program. In 2003, the government helped locals build methane pits and divert drinking water from far away and turned the former dirt road into an asphalt highway. In the past, local villagers cut trees to cook meals, but with more methane pits built, villagers are now planting trees on the barren hills. They are also planting corn, rice and mulberry trees in the terraced land. "I had dreamed of building a house in the flat place beside the highway since I married into the village, and now my dream has come true," said Yang. She no longer has to travel several kilometres to get water and get up early in the morning to cut firewood. The family's annual income has risen to 30,000 yuan (about 3,600 US dollars) from 2,000 yuan (about 240 US dollars).

Great changes have also taken place in other villagers' lives. Tian Jingjie, who experienced a hard time in the past, is the first villager to run a store in the village. Now his family earns more than 10,000 yuan (about 1,200 US dollars) from farming and doing business annually.

They mainly spend the money on their children's education. Their four children have all entered universities. He, the village head, now works at a new office building which was built with government funding.

He says the newly-built asphalt road has shortened the journey to the county seat from one day to half an hour, enhancing cargo exchanges between the village and the outside. Currently, Changdong Village has 10 stores, a post office and an out-door market where fresh pork, beef and vegetables are available everyday.