China Focus: Forty years of change in just one hour

FEEDING THE PEOPLE

Seeing folks leave for cities and bring back fortunes, former farmer Han Yonghui left his rural home in Xiangfen county in 1997 to start a shaobing business in Tianjin. Shaobing is a type of flat bread usually eaten for breakfast.

"I never thought a farmer like me could live in such a big city and own my own business," said Han, who now runs a small restaurant in Miyun district, Beijing.

He sells dozens of shaobing an hour during the breakfast rush, making over 10,000 yuan a month.

When he first left his hometown, he had to walk for an hour to the nearest train station, wait in line overnight to buy a ticket, before boarding a packed slow train that took him to Tianjin in 18 sweltering hours.

All that changed in 2014 when high-speed trains reached Han's hometown, cutting his travel time to six hours.

In 2008, China opened its first high-speed railway line, making the 150-km trip between Beijing and Tianjin in half an hour. The length of high-speed railway lines reached 25,000 km in 2017.

Han's siblings all work in cities, earning much more money than they ever did from farming. In 2011, Han bought a car and built a new house in his hometown for his parents.

Tens of millions of rural people like Han no longer consider themselves poor. China aims to eradicate the misery of absolute poverty by 2020. Since 2012, some 68 million population have escaped from the poverty trap, which works out at an average of 1,564 people every hour of every day.

DELIVERING THE GOODS

What an hour means in China is even more shocking when it comes to express delivery and e-commerce.

Postman Guo Xiaohong, 52, used to be the only connection between villagers in remote Lingchuan county and the outside world.

He had to trek dozens of miles to deliver mail, carrying several kilos of parcels. Villagers often turned to him to bring them small commodities that were not available in the village stores.

He walked around 5 km every hour, delivering few letters each day. By contrast, today in the provincial capital of Taiyuan, the company he works for delivers 2,500 packages each hour, largely online purchases.

"Even my 80-year-old mother uses a smartphone now," said Guo, adding that they video call each other every day.

Five years ago, an average of 650,000 packages were delivered each hour. The figure has jumped to over 4.5 million today, representing a lot of jobs and a lot of spending power.

In today's China, every hour nearly 23 billion yuan is spent via smartphone, 3,300 vehicles are produced and goods worth 3.2 billion yuan cross the border.

Reform and opening up may have taken 40 years to get this far, but with each passing hour the miracle continues.