Rural life changes as China tries to eradicate poverty

Wang Deying spent the first 82 years of her life in her ancestral village nestled in the misty mountains of south west China.

Living off the land, without power or water, her 721-person Tibetan community of Qingshui was largely cut off from China's rapid economic growth that has pulled millions of other villages out of poverty.

But then officials of the Sichuan provincial government arrived with construction equipment. They paved roads, installed lines for power and water, and built brand new apartments downhill not unlike planned suburban communities in the West.

They then relocated the entire village from old to new.

Wang hasn't looked back. She says she prefers watching television to the flames of the hearth and is proud that all of her five grandchildren are studying in college.

"Now even the pigs eat rice," she said. "You can eat whatever you like now."

Further down the hill from the new town, a dozen Tibetan women work cabbage patches on a series of wide terraces in the mountain valley.

Chen Shuying, 40, remembers life before the relocation of Qingshui – and she says she's happy now to earn 80 yuan (12 US dollars) a day harvesting cabbages.

She knows the government's plans to eradicate poverty, and says the entire community is backing the effort.

"This is the year to get rid of poverty. The government and everyone are all working on it; the public, the farmers, the village citizens," Chen said.

While other nations invest in developing poor areas, China doesn't hesitate to operate on a more ambitious scale by moving communities wholesale and building new towns in its effort to modernise.

The ruling Communist Party has announced an official target of ending extreme poverty by the end of the year, ahead of next year's 100th anniversary of its founding.

The party says such initiatives have helped to lift millions of people out of poverty. But they can require drastic changes, like uprooting whole communities.

They fuel complaints the party is trying to erase cultures as it prods minorities to embrace the language and lifestyle of the Han, who make up more than 90% of China's population.

At a time when the party faces protests by students in China's northern region of Inner Mongolia over plans to reduce the use of the Mongolian language in schools, officials want to show they are sensitive to minority cultures.

They invited reporters to visit Qingshui and four other villages  Xujiashan, Chengbei Gan'en, Daganyi and Xiaoshan that are part of what authorities see as a successful development project for ethnic minorities of Tibetan and Yi peoples in Sichuan province's Liangshan prefecture.

The initiative is one of hundreds launched over the past four decades to spread prosperity from China's thriving east to the countryside and west.

In one village, Xujiashan, annual household income has risen from 1,750 yuan (260 US dollars) in 2014 to 11,000 yuan (1,600 US dollars), according to its deputy secretary, Zhang Lixin.

He showed journalists the old wooden homes of the villagers; dirt floors, cobwebs and sagging roofs.

Xujiashan, like most of Liangshan county, is the homeland of the Yi people, an ethnic minority with its own language, Nuoso.

The new village boasts multistorey white homes with power, electricity, and ubiquitous posters of President Xi Jinping.

Xie Jinming, a 70-year old Yi, enjoys the modern life.

Speaking to reporters beneath a portrait of Xi, he lamented the conditions of his old home and thanked the Communist Party for giving them new ones.

"That old house was very dusty because we burned wood. And now the Communist Party has built new houses for us," he said.

Murals on buildings in Xujiashan depict the Yi with members of the Han majority in amicable scenes. One shows a baby holding a heart emblazoned with the ruling party's hammer-and-sickle symbol.

In Sichuan, which includes some of China's poorest areas, 80 billion yuan (12 billion US dollars) has been spent to date to relocate 1.4 million people, according to the local government.

That includes 370,000 new homes and over 110,000 kilometres (68,000 miles) of rural roads.

Development initiatives can lead to political tension because many have strategic goals such as strengthening Han control over minority areas by encouraging nomads to settle or diluting the local populace with outsiders.

In Inner Mongolia, students boycotted classes in at least five areas this month over plans to eliminate Mongolian-language textbooks.

The party faces similar complaints that it is suppressing local languages in Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang in the northwest.

Xinjiang's Han party secretary said in 2002 the language of the Uighurs, its most populous ethnic group, was "out of step with the 21st century" and should be abandoned in favour of Mandarin.