China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Xi’s idea of 20 years ago changing farmers’ lives
Five years ago, Hai Guobao’s life was difficult, but not because his family did not work hard.
Generations of the family had farmed mountainous land in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region.
There, summer is arid, yet rainfall is excessive during autumn harvests. Yields were decided virtually by fate, locals say, after they had invested a whole year’s worth of labor.
“We felt satisfied when we had enough to eat, but drought frequently drew us back to poverty,” said Hai, who is in his 60s.
Hai’s grandchildren did not go to primary school until age 8 because the 8-kilometer round trip to school was too long for younger ones.
“We could never change our lives without the Party’s migration policies,” he said.
In May 2012, all eight members of Hai’s family moved to Minning township in northern Ningxia as part of the region’s plan to relocate 350,000 people out of mountains and valleys in Guyuan.
Hai, along with 67 others in his village, spent only 12,800 yuan ($1,925) to build a new house of 54 square meters, excluding a courtyard, thanks to a government subsidy.
Soldiers based nearby also helped to move the family’s belongings under the Party’s command.
“I felt so happy to find that my new home is connected to electricity and tap water,” Hai said.
“The school is only minutes walk away. I’m illiterate, my son is half-literate, but I hope one day my grandchildren can go to college.”
In the past two decades, more than 60,000 immigrants settled in Minning, which did not exist 20 years ago.
President Xi Jinping proposed moving people in villages to the new settlement in 1997 when he made a survey trip to Ningxia as deputy Party chief of Fujian province. He was deeply concerned with the way people were living in Guyuan, and the United Nations also defined the situation as unfit.
Minning township is located between the eastern foothills of the Helan Mountains, which fend off cold air from Inner Mongolia, and the Yellow River, which is used for irrigation.
In July 2016, Xi revisited Ningxia and called for no one to be left behind regardless of geography or ethnic group as the nation strives to comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society by 2020.
Xi also visited Hai’s home. Hai recalled that Xi went into his kitchen to check his access to water and to lift a pot lid to see what they were having for dinner. Xi also checked whether Hai’s kang, a traditional brick bed that can be heated from the bottom, worked well.
“I was speechless when seeing him. It was like seeing one of my family members returning after a long period of time,” he said. “It was just like a dream.”
Hai’s eldest son now drives agricultural machines for a vineyard nearby and his other son is a construction worker in the town. The family of eight people earns about 80,000 yuan a year.
“We don’t farm now but we eat better than we used to as farmers,” Hai said.
According to Minning’s government, locals’ per capita annual income rose from 500 yuan in 1997 to 10,732 yuan in 2016, surpassing the average for rural residents in the region.
The local economy has also benefitted in recent years from investments from Fujian province and other regions to boost industries and promote modern farming techniques.
Taking the advantage of abundant sunshine, many rooftops are covered with solar panels and locals are helping to grow high-priced raspberries and wine grapes with the help of the dry climate.
A major auto company has also set up a car parts factory to offer more jobs to the migrants. “We will have better development and a better life,” Hai said.
I was speechless when seeing him. It was like seeing one of my family members returning.”
Hai Guobao, farmer, on seeing President Xi coming to visit
Home, sweet new home. Hai Guobao’s memories of his old home revolve around poverty and barely making ends meet. That was why he and his family and 60-plus villagers migrated 300 kilometers from Guyuan, an arid and impoverished mountainous area in the Ningxia Hui autonomus region.
Relocation of impoverished populations is one of the measures the government has adopted for its “targeted poverty-alleviation” program. Under the program, people are advised to move from areas that lack conditions that allow them to make a decent living. However, the residents themselves have to approve the measure.
Hai clearly remembers the difficult decision he had to make five years ago. “We Chinese farmers see our ancestral home as the root of our family,” he said. “Leaving home is a final resort.”
In 1972, Guyuan was recognized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as one of the places most “unfit for human habitation” on Earth. It was the first area covered by a resettlement program established by the government in the early 1980s.
Hai, a village head widely respected by his villagers, was entrusted to go and see what the villagers’ new homes would look like. He recalled what he told his neighbors when he returned: “If you trust me, you have to listen to me this time. Electricity, tap water, jobs ... the government has thought it all out for us. It will be a life from our dreams.”
Because a great many people helped with the relocation process, Hai had no idea who he should thank specifically until July last year when he received a special guest, President Xi Jinping. It was Xi who kick-started the construction of Hai’s new village 20 years ago.
Another unique measure the government uses to fight poverty is a program called “East-West Pairing-off Cooperation for Poverty Reduction”, whereby a developed province in the east assists a less-developed region in the west.
As a provincial leader in the eastern province of Fujian, which was paired with Ningxia, Xi was shocked to see the plight of local farmers, and proposed building a new village called Minning (FujianNingxia) village. The past 20 years have seen the resident’s per capita incomes rise 20-fold.
It’s little wonder that Xi, who has strong feelings about poverty relief, proposed the ambitious goal of lifting every impoverished person out of poverty by 2020, meaning 10 million people being freed from scarcity every year.
Hai said he thanked President Xi for his help, and later put a large photo of Xi with his family in the most prominent place in the living room.
Asked whether he misses his old home, Hai conceded that he did, and said the family visits their old home once a year. There, the infertile farmland has been planted with trees, and the mountains are gradually becoming greener.