Poverty Alleviation Benefits All

Born in 1966, Yu Fumin is tall, thin and looks older than his age. He and his wife live in one of the fields along the G40 Shaanxi-Shanghai Expressway. Their home is a small, dark, wooden shed, piled with sundry items, with hardly any room to stand. They grow green vegetables beside the house, and next to their greenhouse is a line of one-meter-tall walnut tree saplings. Their tiny dwelling is just 50 meters away from the noisy expressway, where trucks and other vehicles thunder past at all times of the day.

Yu Fumin lives in China’s mid-western city of Shangluo in Shaanxi Province. Zhou Lin

Shake off Grinding Poverty

Yu Fumin’s home is in China’s northwestern city of Shangluo in Shaanxi Province, 110 kilometers southeast of Xi’an, the provincial capital. Traveling there to Shangluo, however, takes almost two and a half hours, as the bus passes through the Daba Mountain tunnel.

Shangluo is located in a water conservation area midway along the south-to-north water transfer project, and is also a mineral rich area. Yet Shangluo’s economy is yet to gain ground. It is one of the country’s 14 poverty-stricken areas that constitute the nation’s one percent poorest.

As Director of the Municipal Development and Reform Commission Zhang Yongping observed, “The one urban district and six counties of Shangluo are all poverty-ridden areas. Changing this is a monumental task.”

Annihilation of poverty is one of China’s main goals over the next five years, and perceived as the biggest challenge to building a moderately well-off society in the country. It entails changing the conditions of 665 poverty-stricken counties nationwide in order to lift more than 70 million people out of poverty by 2020. For Shangluo, this means helping its 490,200 residents shake off poverty.

The village where Yu Fumin lives was formerly called Wangjian. It merged with two other rural communities of Yangyuhe Town in December 2014 to form Xieyuan Village. In addition to migrant workers employed at nearby private enterprises and other members of the so-called floating population, Xieyuan Village has 2,154 permanent residents.

At the end of 2015 the Yangyuhe Town government set up a database of poor households in the region through surveys based on the national poverty line of RMB 2,500 in annual net income, and the provincial poverty line of RMB 2,950. It identified 86 people in 44 households in Xieyuan Village that qualified for targeted relief measures.

“These families are poverty-stricken because they include disabled or chronically ill family members and those too old to find paid work, or laborers who have suffered accidents or calamities. All are in desperate need of help,” village Party secretary Yu Xuefeng said. “According to national policy, we should help them shake off poverty in three years. The Yangyuhe Town government has dispatched a three-member work team to the village to set up a timetable and put the process into motion,” he added.

As of 2015, Shangluo City had identified 701 poor villages and 161,900 poor households of 490,200 people. The second task is to provide specific assistance according to the needs of each case in various villages and different households; also to evaluate the achievements of the 885 work teams carrying out on-target poverty reduction work.