Around China: Deciphering the Chinese economy, from grassroots

To buffer the economic downturn, the Chinese government has loosened monetary policy through rate and reserve requirement cuts, deepened economic reforms, reduced government intervention, and rolled out infrastructure projects from railways to power plants.

But how did these policies actually effect those at the coalface?

TO FARM, OR NOT TO FARM

For those living in the Loess Plateau in northwest China, the Spring Festival celebration comes at the end of a long, bitter winter. It is also the time of year when people like Su Haiying, from Ganguyi Town in Yan'an City, calculate how much they earned in the outgoing Lunar Year.

Su may be from farming stock but he no longer tends the sweet potatoes that were once the most important source of income for generations of farmers working the area's barren, loose, sandy soil.

Instead, Su and his son turned to the more profitable trade of building material transportation.

"The Year of the Horse was bad for our transportation business," Su lamented, adding that in 2014 he and his son only earned half of what they had in 2013.

China's property market plummeted last year as oversupply dampened buyers' enthusiasm. The crash in real estate investment, especially in new construction projects, played its part in dragging China's economic growth down to a 24-year low.

However, there are other opportunities to make a good wage despite the property market downfall: Infrastructure projects.

Su and his son were able to secure work with a highway construction project, making around 10,000 U.S. dollars.

Meanwhile, Su' s neighbor Tian Guangping was glad that he followed in his father's footsteps and continued to cultivate crops.

"Last year I made about 90,000 yuan (14,000 U.S. dollars)," Tian said. He said the money came from the sweet potatoes that he had grown on his half a hectare plot of rented land.

Sweet potatoes from Ganguyi have a great reputation as the tubers grow particularly well in the region's soil.

Tian has big dreams for the Year of the Sheep. His town plans to establish a 24 hectare organic sweet potato farm in 2015. Tian hopes to be involved in the project as "green products" fetch a higher price on the domestic market.

The Party' s flagship magazine Qiushi on Monday published an article by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang that advocated agricultural modernization. Li wrote that this was increasingly more important as it would stabilize economic growth and promote structural transformation.

The article follows a commitment by the central government earlier this month to expedite agricultural modernization through favorable policies, deepened reform and technological innovation.

NEW TRENDS

Su's "yaodong", a house dug out of a hillside, is now connected to the Internet. A township official said about half of the families living in villages near the town center are also connected, with plans to expand the network further.

This is to expected to narrow the e-commerce usage gap between urban and rural residents. Experts forecast that the rural e-commerce market will top 460 billion yuan by 2016 in terms of online sales, and has the potential to exceed urban consumption within the next decade.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced last October that it would invest 10 billion yuan over the next three to five years to build 1,000 operating centers in county seats and up to 100,000 service outlets in villages.

The isolated Losses Plateau also sees more and more of the younger generation leave for the bigger cities, and many in the area only expect this trend to continue.

According to a local government official who requested anonymity, only about 30 people now live in his village, as compared to the officially registered population of 360.

"Almost every young man and woman has left for the city," the official said. "They are now construction workers or waitresses."

"The young people don't see farming as a 'good job'," one villager said. Endit