Relocation offers people of the Yi ethnic group well-grounded futures

Qume Mutuhuo, a 52-year-old member of the Yi ethnic group, received a kouxian, a type of traditional jaw harp, as her dowry and plays it whenever she feels homesick.

The day she was married in a small village in Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, Sichuan province, more than 30 years ago, she held the musical instrument tightly in her hand.

It took Qume and her relatives four hours to climb two mountains to get to Lamujue village for the wedding ceremony.

Since then she had never ventured far from Lamujue until this year, when a relocation project enabled her family to bid farewell to the isolated village. "I never expected that I would live in a fancy apartment," Qume said.

Tong Zhangshun, an official with the National Development and Reform Commission, said at a recent forum that over the past five years, China has relocated 9.6 million impoverished rural residents to more habitable areas, with most later lifted out of poverty.

China aims to eradicate absolute poverty by the end of this year. Liangshan, home to 178,000 impoverished people, is one of the poorest regions in the country.

Zhao Zaori is Qume's husband and his family have lived impoverished existences deep in the mountains for generations. Before relocating, the couple earned a living by raising goats and pigs and toiling in the fields, with meager yields from the barren land.

To send their six children to school, they saved every penny they could. "We didn't want our children to be as poor as we were," Qume said.

When Qume's father-in-law had a bout of appendicitis several years ago, Zhao and a group of villagers carried the old man for seven hours to a hospital in town for treatment. It was then that Qume heard about urban life from Zhao. "People in town have decent apartments, with schools and hospitals at their doorsteps," Qume recalled him telling her.

She said that she was thrilled by the thought of one day joining them.

In June, with the help of government funding, the family moved to a three-bedroom apartment near the county seat. They contributed 10,000 yuan ($1,496) of their own money to the relocation. The county government gave them a television, washing machine and 1,000 yuan to buy furniture.

Subsidies and low-interest loans were also offered by the government to help relocated people find employment and support their efforts to join cooperatives.

Qume now sews socks for a traditional Yi embroidery cooperative and earns about 100 yuan a day.

The couple has also harvested over 1,000 kilograms of potatoes, 350 kg of buckwheat, and corn from their original farmland since moving, but the farm work was difficult.

"The fields are too far away, so I'll lease them next year and find a job in town," Zhao said, adding that he and his wife plan to retire after all their children graduate from college.

Three of their children are at university, including two who are studying medicine. Their youngest daughter, 17, is now in senior high school.

"I hope my children can become doctors, partly because of the appendicitis that almost killed my father in the village," Zhao said.

On the evening before they relocated, the villagers invited Qume to perform. She took out her kouxian, which she said she had not played in a long time, and played a sentimental song. "The song I played is about leaving home, and also about the expectation of a brand-new future," she said.