Poverty alleviation efforts bear fruit in Guizhou town

The Xinxing community in Guizhou province is home to several new dwellings for people who have moved here from impoverished areas. Among them is 36-year-old Zhu Fumin.

Zhu was a local villager and due to the poor living environment, her family could not live on their earnings from agriculture. She had to find a job in a distant region.

Her husband had a severe stomach illness and her mother had mental health problem. Zhu's 16-year-old son had been living in a relative's home, which made it easier for him to go to school.

But life has been looking up since June, when Zhu's family was allocated an 80-square-meter new house in the Xinxing community.

"I had worked in Shanghai for 11 years to support the family and went back home after knowing we were allocated a house," Zhu said, adding they had lived in a dilapidated wooden house and never imagined they could own a new house in the county.

With the help of the community, she found a packaging job in a local biotechnology company. Her commute to work is less than 20 minutes, via an electric bicycle.

"My basic salary is more than 2,000 yuan ($299) and I also have overtime wage," Zhu said. "I speak Putonghua (the standard Mandarin) well and may be promoted to packaging team leader." Her husband, meanwhile, found a security guard job with a monthly salary of 2,400 yuan and her mother made several friends in the community.

The community is located in Daozhen Gelao and Miao autonomous county, a poor region in Guizhou and near Chongqing. In 2016, the county began to help about 15,000 impoverished farmers in 14 villages and counties to move.

Zhu's family is representative of the successful poverty alleviation campaign in Guizhou. The province plans to move 1.88 million people during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20) .

Luo Yinghe, Party chief of the Xinmin community in Huishui county and a deputy to the National People's Congress, is one of the relocated people in Guizhou. He said the policy brought wealth and happiness to many families.

The county of Daozhen rebuilt and expanded three schools for relocation sites and arrangements have been made so all the 1,800-plus school-age children can study in nearby schools.

Plans are in the works to build nine industrial parks for poverty alleviation, mainly planting edible mushrooms and vegetables. The parks will help more than 1,100 relocated households to work in the neighborhood. Two of the parks have begun construction and the other seven will start construction in the near future.

Daozhen also organized several job fairs and offered skill training. By the end of 2018, 6,854 people had found a stable job.

Sun Zhigang, Party chief of Guizhou, said at a work conference in late February that the current work is changing from relocation to settlement. The efforts should bring real wealth to those people in a stable and sustainable way, he said.

Zhao Yandi contributed to this story.

songmengxing@chinadaily.com.cn