Building a bridge to a better life
Guizhou’s infrastructure developments help to transport the province out of poverty
Editor’s note: The Communist Party of China Central Committee, with General Secretary Xi Jinping at the core, has led the whole nation to achieve great progress in all aspects. China Daily Global Edition is publishing a series of articles on the pursuit of progress to take a look at the changes over the past decade.
In mid-January, Leng Tongguai of Haiyuan — a village in the town of Haila in Southwest China’s mountainous Guizhou province — rode his three-wheeled cart to Kuangshan, a town on the other side of the Niulan River in Yunnan province.
He went to sell potatoes, sweet potatoes and home-brewed cider. With the money he earned, Leng, who is in his late 30s, bought goods such as rice and fish for Spring Festival, the one-week holiday that began on Jan 22.
“Since the zip line (over the river) was replaced by a bridge, it is easy for us to travel and to sell our produce,” Leng said.
The zip line — a cable or rope with a suspended harness, pulley, or handle — was formerly the “road” in the air from one side of the Niulan River to the other, so that local people had a shortcut to the outside world.
“Years ago, we had to either take a boat or the zip line if we wanted to go to the market on the other side of the river,” Leng said. “If we took a boat, we had to buy a ticket and go at the scheduled time. If we went on the zip line, we had to carry the homebrewed alcohol and other produce on our back.”
Leng recalled that when he took an ox on the zip line several years ago, it fell into the river and was swept away.
Now, to reach the market whenever he wants, Leng rides his threewheeled cart on the bridge over the river. “It is easy and fast,” he added.
Haila, the town in which Haiyuan village is located, is ringed on three sides by towering mountains. On the fourth side is the Niulan River.
“More than 20,000 households, or about 100,000 residents, in the town in the mountains were literally isolated from the outside world for ages,” said Zeng Chaoding, the Party chief of Haiyuan village. “They lived on corn and potatoes.”
There are more than 20 zip lines over the Niulan River, which divides Guizhou and Yunnan provinces.
As bridges have replaced zip lines, many people living deep in the mountains have bought motorbikes, threewheeled carts or cars. Though living in the mountains, they are no longer isolated. In Haiyuan village, which has 1,300 residents, there are more than 60 cars.
Leng, who raises cattle and uses corn to make alcohol, earns about 60,000 yuan ($8,700) a year.
The bridges have turned out to be a shortcut to better livelihoods for local farmers. Haiyuan villagers can now sell produce such as sweet potatoes and ginseng on the other side of the river.
Improved transportation has been a major strategy for reducing regional poverty in Guizhou.
A host of giant infrastructure projects have been rolled out over the past decade, and these have reshaped the province. Nowadays, Guizhou is home to almost half of the 100 highest bridges in the world, with many of these completed in the past decade.
Bridges, in the mountains and hills that account for more than 90 percent of Guizhou’s landmass, have helped the province achieve its seemingly unattainable poverty-reduction goal.
The efficiency of transportation has been continuously improved as part of the poverty alleviation efforts, with remarkable results.
With the improved accessibility and
implementation of other antipoverty strategies, Guizhou has been transformed from a region with the deepest poverty and the largest number of impoverished people in China into a region in which all counties have been lifted out of poverty, and extreme poverty has been eradicated.
Bridges have turned the onceisolated province into a gateway to Southwest China, boosting the flow of people, tourism and investments and driving economic growth.
Guizhou has seen significant improvements in other transportation infrastructure as well during the past decade. The province managed to connect all its counties with expressways by 2015.
Two years later, it took the lead in western China in bringing paved roads and public transport to all villages.
Guizhou is also known as the “museum of world bridges”, thanks to more than 20,000 bridges across the province, according to Xinhua News Agency.
By official count, 251 high bridges have been built in Guizhou since 2000 as part of the province’s mountain road network.
During his fact-finding trip to Guizhou in 2015, President Xi Jinping wanted to learn how poverty reduction projects were being run. He urged the government of Guizhou to pursue economic development through innovation and to improve people’s livelihoods.
In 2021, Xi visited Guizhou again. By choosing the province — home to the last nine counties removed from the country’s poverty list — he wanted to see in person the living conditions
of those who had shaken off poverty, and to promote steady progress in rural vitalization.
As Xi has said, being lifted out of poverty is not an end in itself, but the starting point of a new life and a new pursuit.
As China has gained a decisive victory in ending absolute poverty, the focus of work concerning agriculture, rural areas and farmers has shifted to promoting rural vitalization.
In order to revitalize its mountainous areas, Guizhou is continuing to build bridges.
Above the grand canyon of southwest Guizhou’s Huajiang River, which features towering cliffs and fast-flowing currents, a steel-truss girder suspension bridge is under construction.
With a distance of 625 meters from the bridge deck to the water’s surface, the bridge is expected to become the highest in the world after completion in 2025. It will cut the travel time across the canyon from about an hour to a mere one minute, according to Xinhua.
Xu Xianghua, the chief engineer of the Guizhou provincial department of transportation, said the bridges have enabled the leapfrogging of transportation development in the mountainous province and will serve as paths to prosperity.