China-Vietnam border county town flourishes
▶ Former conflict zone turned into patriotic tourism site
Hou Xingping, a 78-year-old villager in Malipo, a county in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province bordering Vietnam, is brimming with hope and high expectations for the future.
Hou is busy planning for his new 8-bedroom homestay, located next door to his two-story villa in Tianbao village.
“Life is getting better for sure,” he told the Global Times on Saturday.
The village sits at the heart of a military-themed tourist site featuring local history from the 1980s. The region was at the frontline of China’s brief war with Vietnam back in 1979 and military clashes in the 1980s.
With over 130
million yuan ($19 million) in investment, the AAAA-level tourist site is expected to open at the end of April and is expected to bring 100,000 tourists every year and serve as a base for patriotic and defense education, Lu Zhengbin, head of the tourism department of Malipo’s culture and tourism bureau, told the Global Times on Sunday.
For local residents, the project is expected to bring business, especially in catering, accommodations and local specialties. Tourism-based industry is expected to be more profitable than farming, which brings around only 1,000 yuan annually per person.
The change for Hou’s family was already obvious. Before the project was launched, he lived in an 80-square-meter house made of mud and bricks. Now he has not only a 400-squaremeter villa, but also a nearby building he plans to turn into a homestay.
Residents have been offered subsidies and other assistance from local government, such as training sessions on how to run a homestay, said Lu.
Lu noted that the tourist site not only serves as a reminder to cherish peace, but also is a promising engine to boost local tourism and eliminate poverty.
Border town
Miles away from Tianbao village is the Tianbao port, a national-level port that witnessed around 3.5 billion yuan in foreign trade volume in 2018.
Trade between border residents increased 5 percent yearon-year to 2.5 billion yuan during the first 10 months of 2018 and the most popular products included fruit, seafood and dried chili, according to data provided by the port’s management committee.
Every Saturday, border residents from China and Vietnam rush to a weekly fair at the port to trade daily commodities, herbs and traditional Chinese medicines, local fruit and specialties.
A 50-something woman from China’s Zhuang ethnic group was selling embroidery and silver products at the fair on Saturday.
She told the Global Times that coming to the fair not only earns money but also helps make her life more colorful.
The port hosts shops selling Vietnamese fruit, specialties, seafood and handicrafts. Stores often display both Chinese and Vietnamese names, and though the stores are run by Chinese, they are often staffed by Vietnamese nationals, some of whom understand and speak simple Chinese.
A Vietnamese woman in her 20s told the Global Times that she was paid 1,500 yuan per month to sell fruit at the port, while working at home only brought her about 1,000 yuan a month.
With improved infrastructure, such as expressways still under construction and bigger warehouses, the port could become a free trade zone in the future, and it is expected to be a frontier region for more opportunities in Southeast Asia, said Zhang Quanming, an official at the port’s management committee.
After learning proper trade procedures, border residents, who often have limited education, feel more secure about engaging in business, he said.
Apart from border trade, marriage between border residents also offers a glimpse at how the people of the two countries interact, 40 years after the military clashes.
The Yunling border village of Malipo, home to nearly 300 households, has 28 Vietnamese women who got married to local residents, village officials told the Global Times, noting that the history of cross-border marriages goes back hundreds of years and has bonded the villages.
In the eyes of Malipo-based independent scholar Adrew Deng, the war did not leave border residents with hatred.
Deng said the connection between the Chinese and Vietnamese in the border region, who have shared the same culture, ethnicity and close kinship for hundreds of years, cannot be broken so easily.
What the border residents care about is how to jointly overcome difficulty and help each other strive for a better life, said Deng .
No one is sure how many wartime weapons, such as land mines, were left in Malipo’s border villages or where they are.
The mines, hidden in and around villagers’ farmland, have cost residents arms and legs and even their lives. They are reminders of the history of a region that has moved forward without the memory of the war’s wounds.
Thirty years ago, this was the frontline of the ChineseVietnam War. Land mines were the most effective weapon to impede enemies.
Soldiers would spend their time laying mines during the short intervals when both sides weren’t shooting.
About 700 meters away from the county sits a martyr memorial park where more than 900 martyrs who died during the war are buried. The martyrs are not forgotten by histoty as the park is often visited by war survivors and visitors. Visitors were offering flowers at the park when a Global Times reporter visited the site on Saturday.
The park is also a site for patriotic education.
The war of decades ago has not left hatred, and the governments of the two sides have made constant efforts to maintain sound and steady momentum for bilateral cooperation in recent years.
The fifth high-level border meeting between the Chinese and Vietnamese militaries opened in November 2018 in South China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with the two sides pledging to maintain stability in border areas.