Moving to a better life
Resettlement project helps villagers in Tibet improve their living conditions
Because its harsh environment is one of the main causes of poverty, the Tibet autonomous region has been striving to relocate residents to more inhabitable places as a key part of its poverty alleviation efforts.
More than 260,000 residents have been relocated in the region over the past five years to ensure better living conditions, according to the region’s latest government work report
Unlike most of the region’s resettlement projects, which address problems related to living in inhospitable places at extremely high altitudes, the project in Bupal village, Zayul county, Nyingchi, helps families deal with limited resources.
With an investment of more than 70 million yuan ($11 million), the project involves 365 people in 65 households who were moved from Tsawarong — a remote, impoverished township in Zayul county lacking farmland — in 2015.
Village officials said the residents were mainly from Bupal, but also included villagers from Tsawarong’s five other villages. The new resettlement in Zayul is also named Bupal.
In Tsawarong they lived on a mountain slope and often had trouble with transportation, housing and obtaining safe drinking water.
The new location has an average altitude of 1,600 meters and a subtropical monsoon climate. With adequate rainfall throughout the year, it is suitable for raising crops.
In the new Bupal, the villagers have been provided with new houses, safe drinking water and other basic facilities such as schools, clinics and libraries.
Villager Adi said that before relocating, his family lived on the shoulder of a big mountain, where the transportation was so inconvenient that it took him two days to travel from his village to the township seat. Farming was the only source of income for his family.
“It took me two hours walking from my home to the unirrigated field, cultivating the crops by using mules and horses, and people also carried things on their backs,” Adi said.
“There was no hospital in our village before 2015, and we had to walk or ride a horse for up to two days to get to the township for our medical needs,” he said, adding that the hospital was 20 kilometers away from the village. “Now we have a clinic in the village with two medics working here every day.”
Adi said education is also more accessible in Bupal now.
“In the past, the school was so far away that the dropout rate was high in the village,” he said. “Many people were reluctant to go, but now, going to school is much more convenient.”
To earn money, many villagers are now participating in a fruit plantation cooperative, and they also receive border subsidies.
The fruit plantation was started in 2017. Villagers who worked on it between 2017 and 2018 collectively
earned more than 700,000 yuan.
Last year, each villager received a dividend of 1,200 yuan from the coop. Adi’s family received 6,000 yuan, as his family has five people.
Before 2015, when they were living on the mountain slope, Adi’s family income was less than 10,000 yuan. In 2019, it increased to about 40,000 yuan, and it was more than 50,000 yuan last year.
“I am pleased with the new relocation site,” he said. “Here, we live in a better house which is brighter, has
more space and is more comfortable.”
Adi said the new house also has a bathroom, which is clean and convenient, and there are more rooms, so his family has more private spaces.
“Benefiting from an overall lift by living in a new relocation site, the variety of our diet has also increased,” he said. “Instead of just having barley or corn dishes, now we have more choices on our dining table.”
Generations of people who have devoted their lives to China’s revolution have recorded and recounted the stories of Jiangxi province’s Jinggangshan, where the Communist Party of China established its first rural revolutionary base.
Mao Haofu is among the younger generation taking the baton. The 32-year-old returned to Jinggangshan to pursue his calling after studying finance at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom and working for two years in Jiangxi’s capital, Nanchang.
Since 2017, he has given lectures and tours to trainees of the Jiangxi Executive Leadership Academy and international visitors to historical sites, narrating Jinggangshan’s history with lucid and engaging storytelling.
He is essentially following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Mao Binghua, who gave up his job in Nanchang in the 1960s and took his family to Jinggangshan to support the Jinggangshan Revolution Museum’s construction.
Mao Binghua served as the museum’s curator for 21 years. During his four decades of retirement, he volunteered to give over 20,000 lectures about Jinggangshan’s history and took field trips around the country to visit veteran soldiers and collect research materials and artifacts.
During a holiday at home at the beginning of 2017, Mao Haofu accompanied his grandfather, who was 88 years old and yet insisted on working despite the cold, on field research to Beijing and Hebei province. The experience influenced him deeply and served as an incentive for him to quit his job in Nanchang.
Mao Binghua later wrote a letter to Mao Haofu, saying: “I’ve been teaching the Jinggangshan spirit for 47 years. My main understanding is to combine history with reality, theory with practice, ideology with artistry, and advocating for others while transforming oneself.”
He explained: “What’s especially important is to transform our own worldviews to truly learn about, believe in and apply the Jinggangshan spirit. This is a lifelong pursuit.”
In 2017, Mao Haofu started to prepare a series of courses about the history of the CPC. That summer, he started lecturing at the academy full time.
The courses combine lectures in classrooms and at historical sites.
One tour led Mao to discover his particular strength lies in bilingual lectures.
He was recommended when a group of visitors from a dozen countries needed an English-speaking guide.
“That was a great training opportunity for me,” he recalled.
“Only I could tell them stories about
my hometown. I truly felt a sense of mission and that it was a true embodiment of my personal value.”
He has guided tours for international visitors since then. He goes beyond simply translating the written materials into English and has developed his own principles to convey information in ways that are easily understandable to people of diverse cultural backgrounds.
“I’ve observed that foreign visitors who come from completely different cultural contexts than we do may not be able to immediately absorb the information,” Mao Haofu said.
International visitors, he said, may not have heard of many historical
figures familiar to Chinese people. So, he clearly explains the historical context, state of Chinese society at the time and important characters’ background stories.
He strives to acquire a deep understanding of Jinggangshan’s history, make sure his translations of historical materials are accurate and narrate these in captivating ways.
After his grandfather passed away, he became the director of Mao Binghua’s studio, working with academies and governmental bodies to research and promote China’s modern history.
“My previous lectures were mostly delivered face-to-face. Now, we’re also making videos for new media platforms,
including WeChat and Douyin, with more down-to-earth formats,” Mao Haofu said.
While his in-person lectures typically last at least 10 minutes, Mao Haofu started to summarize the core points and choose the most captivating perspectives from which to tell the stories online.
“We’re constantly thinking about how to narrate history and the Jinggangshan spirit in more lively ways preferred by young people,” he said.
“Chinese culture not only incorporates traditional culture but also red revolutionary culture. I truly feel proud of my country and of being Chinese.”