It announced that the entire country was now free of poverty. The prefecture became infamous for extreme poverty in 2015 when a woman there poisoned her four children with pesticide before killing herself, writing she could no longer bear her family's dire financial condition. Nearly a quarter of that funding went to Guizhou's Bijie prefecture, where Qixingguan sits. In 2019 alone, the province spent nearly RMB 1.8 trillion ($280 billion) on anti-poverty projects. Consistently the poorest province by per capita income, Guizhou has turned to everything from making rice liquor to building data farms in the last decade to raise wages. Transforming mountainous Guizhou became a priority. (China defines poverty as earning below RMB 4,000 a year, or around $600, a slightly lower threshold than the World Bank threshold for extreme poverty.) To boost average incomes, China expanded its welfare system to give direct cash payments to rural retirees and those living below the poverty line. Starting in 2015, local governments have built more than 700,000 miles of roads, threading together once far-flung communities to more prosperous economic hubs. Luo and her new neighbors are recipients of a massive social reengineering project designed to tackle long-standing rural poverty. "Now we are stuck here," she says, gesturing toward Qixingguan. Luo looked into moving back to her old house in the mountains, a three-hour drive away, where water was free and she could grow her own produce, but she found the village entirely demolished. Luo Beiling relocated from a remote village to Qixingguan and now works in this market outside the compound. She and other residents say commitments to provide good jobs never materialized, revealing how the sticky legacy of inequality – between China's affluent urban centers and its more rural outposts – remains. "We were tricked," said Luo Beiling, who relocated her family to Qixingguan, a new district in Bijie, a city scattered in between mountains in Guizhou province, in 2018. Near the complex, small garment factories were supposed to create jobs, and one of China's biggest real estate companies built two elementary schools.īut many of the complex's some 32,000 residents say they are still waiting for the life they were promised when the community launched in 2018. Identical rows of dozens of yellow apartment buildings, emblazoned with slogans expressing gratitude toward China's Communist Party, provide free living quarters for people once isolated in remote, mountainous villages. (Emily Feng/NPR)īIJIE, China – The Qixingguan community is designed to look like a socialist paradise. Many older residents have had a difficult time adjusting to life away from their fields. Resettled villagers sun themselves outside Qixingguan.
0 kommentar(er)
