President Hu Jintao marked the eve of the Year of the Pig by frying dough twists, eating steamed potatoes and cutting paper window decorations with poor farmers in the barren countryside of northwestern Gansu Province.

Early on Saturday, buses carrying Hu and accompanying officials rocked along the bumpy mountain roads to Daping Village of Dingxi in Gansu Province, which Hu had visited once before in 1999, to order local officials to work harder to alleviate poverty.

"Dear villagers, I come to wish you a happy new year," said Hu, addressing a crowd of farmers in front of a village house.

In one villager's home, Hu sat with farmers and children, asking how much grain their farm produced and what the family's income was.

One of the farmers gave the president a full basket of potatoes, telling him that, like many others, his life had improved by planting potatoes.

The Lunar New Year of 2007, which started on Sunday, is the Year of the Pig a creature considered a symbol of wealth and good fortune.

But farmers in Gansu are far from wealthy.

Last year, the income of each farmer in this northwestern province was estimated at only 2,100 yuan ($296), far below the 3,587 yuan ($440) national average for farmers.

Hu has spent the previous three Lunar New Year eves visiting poor rural residents. Last year, he fried rice cakes, drank home-made wine and danced with villagers in rural Yan'an of Shaanxi Province, also in northwestern China.

A day before Hu's visit to Daping, Premier Wen Jiabao made his new year trip to low-income families in Fushun, a city in Northeast China's Liaoning Province. It was Wen's second trip in fewer than four years to the city, one of the major coal mining centers in the country's old northeastern industrial base.

At the home of 74-year-old retired worker Zhang Yuanzhou, Wen said Fushun had contributed 1 billion tons of coal to the country since 1949.

"The central government must solve the problems for workers in the old industrial base. The first step is housing. The second is employment," Wen said. "Harmony will not be achieved until people live a stable life and enjoy their work."

The second day of the Lunar New Year February 19 coincides with the 10th anniversary of the death of Deng Xiaoping, who initiated the economic reforms of the late 1970s, which benefited much of the country, especially coastal cities.

But growth triggered by the reforms left the majority of China's 900 million farmers behind.

Last year, per-capita income for farmers was less than one third of the level of urban residents. Official statistics put the number of rural people living in poverty at 21.5 million.

The central leadership particularly has launched a "develop-the-west" drive focusing on the vast and poor western regions and a "revive the old northeastern industrial base" drive to boost the economy in three northeastern provinces, where a large number of State-owned factory workers were laid off during the economic reforms of the 1990s.

According to official statistics, the central budget allocated 1.14 trillion yuan ($139.3 billion) for construction in rural regions, agriculture and modernizing farming from 2003 to 2006.

The government has also phrased out the ancient agricultural tax and set a minimum purchase price for major grain products.

In his New Year speech, Premier Wen Jiabao called on officials to pay more attention to issues concerning people's immediate interests, saying it was the government's most important responsibility.

(China Daily February 23, 2007)