Eighteen-hole village in Huayuan County, Xiangxi Prefecture, Hunan Province, an ancient and young Miao village.
Kong Mingying is in charge of the kitchen. The family has a farm and has to entertain several groups of guests a day. She was busy, but she was smiling.
Eighteen-hole village was once a dilapidated house
Once "the two forks of the ravine are poor, and the sweet potatoes are wrapped in grain every day", which is famous for its high mountains and long roads, closed and backward. Marrying a daughter-in-law is a big problem in the village, and she does not dare to say that she is from the Eighteen-Hole Village.
Nowadays, standing at the mouth of the village, you can look up and see the wooden buildings of the villages and mountains, which are interdependent and the tiles are like scales.
Eighteen-hole village entrance Photo by Li Maojun
Every household hangs a variety of signs, farmhouses, homestays, snack bars, milk tea shops, wineries, etc., accompanied by the hustle and bustle of tourists, a lively scene.
Photo by Li Maojun
One
In the Eighteen-Hole Village, every hall of every household has its doors open to welcome visitors to their homes and take photos. In the hall, the family hung photos of General Secretary Xi Jinping during the discussion in the Eighteen-Hole Village.
It was November 3, 2013. A village cadre recalled to reporters that the general secretary walked around the village along the dirt road, the line was about 800 meters, not long, but it took most of the day to visit the door.
Along the way, the general secretary kept asking about the people's livelihood in the village and the channels of peasants' income, and the cadres replied that most of them relied on going out to work, and there was no more way.
At the last stop, in the courtyard of a family, the villagers of the village sat around that day.
In the face of the fathers and fellow villagers around him, the general secretary proposed "precision poverty alleviation" for the first time. He told the villagers: "When we grasp poverty alleviation, we must not shout big slogans, nor should we set those lofty goals." Poverty alleviation is to seek truth from facts, adapt to local conditions, classify guidance, and accurately alleviate poverty. ”
Enter the village to visit the bus. Photo by Li Maojun
The people of Eighteen-Hole Village know in their hearts that the place of initiation must have the initiative to do the initiative, and they must take the lead in exploring the way in the working mechanism of accurate poverty alleviation. In less than two months, 6 party members and cadres were stationed in the village of Eighteen Caves.
Shi Jintong, who was the first secretary of the Eighteen-Hole Village at the time, recalled that after entering the village, he found that the expectations of the people were too high, and some villagers thought that the state would spend endless money for themselves, and directly asked: How much money does each person share?
Poverty alleviation is the first to identify poverty, and the task force initially drafted a "four non-evaluations" for accurate poverty identification: those who do not evaluate commercial housing, those who eat financial meals, those who have cars, and those who run enterprises and open stores.
After that, the "four non-evaluation" was upgraded to a more accurate "nine non-evaluation", such as "there is a car without evaluation" refined to: there are large and medium-sized agricultural machinery, cars, and minibuses that do not evaluate.
In half a year, the task force explored a set of mechanisms to accurately identify poor households, with 939 people from 225 households in 18-hole villages and 533 people from 136 poor households.
The task force registered the poor people into households, built file cards, and each of them clearly wrote down the causes of poverty, the current situation of the family, the needs of poverty alleviation, etc., so that the poverty data for the first time achieved accurate to the village, to the household, to the people, which provided a sample for the accurate identification of poverty in the country later.
After accurately selecting the industry, the eighteen-hole village "walks on five legs":
Attracted the top domestic technology of kiwifruit planting, planting 1,000 mu of kiwifruit; implementing the "company + base + farmer" model, breeding 1,500 cattle and goats in Western Hunan Province; developing the technology and tourism industry in the eighteen-hole village; establishing cooperatives to develop the miao embroidery industry; implementing demonstration projects for poverty alleviation in commodity vegetables and other industries, and establishing 199 farmers' cooperatives. In February 2017, less than four years later, Eighteen-Hole Village was successfully lifted out of poverty. In 2020, the per capita annual income of the whole village increased to 18,369 yuan, which is 11 times that of the pre-precision poverty alleviation.
Shops in the village of Eighteen Holes. Photo by Gong Danyun
The precise poverty alleviation strategy first proposed in Eighteen-Hole Village has been continuously improved in national practice, providing an action guide for winning the battle against poverty. China's road to poverty alleviation has entered a new stage characterized by precision.
Tea farmers in Huayuan County. Photo by Gong Danyun
Two
Zunyi City, Guizhou Province, Wuchuan Gelao and Miao Autonomous County, is one of the corresponding poverty alleviation points in Shanghai. The mountains of the karst landscape do not hold water, the villagers have lacked water for generations, and every household has built a water cellar to accumulate rainwater, but the "wangtian water" has been left for a long time and is not clean.
To get rid of poverty, we must first solve the problem of drinking water according to local conditions.
Commonly used electric water extraction, the average cost of use per ton of water is more than 10 yuan. Even if it is successful, the mountainous areas will not be able to afford such expensive water for a long time to follow. So what to do? Shanghai's poverty alleviation cadres are constantly looking for targeted solutions and have discovered a "black technology": nature can carry water.
No electricity, no oil, the use of water's drop potential energy to generate huge energy, the water to send to a higher place. This method is particularly suitable for the unique landforms of Wuchuan County.
The difficulty of construction is beyond imagination.
For example, in the natural water lifting project of Tianshan Village, more than 300 6-meter-long, 800-kilogram thick pipes need to be transported up the mountain. The excavator opened the road to ensure that the truck crossed the bend smoothly, and there was a crane behind the truck, and once the truck was found to have signs of landslide, it was immediately towed. Such a combination of 3 cars took more than 20 days to transport the materials up the mountain.
Equipment installation is even more difficult. Simple movements on the flat ground, everything becomes no longer simple when you get to the mountain. More than 300 pipes, assembled section by section. In order to ensure that so many construction vehicles go up the mountain, another 2 trucks are dedicated to transporting diesel and gasoline.
Today, at the depth of the stream, the potential energy of the 23-meter water flow transports the water to the top of the mountain with a lift of 700 meters. The water, then flows slowly from the top of the mountain to the homes of Tianshan Village.
At the end of 2019, Shanghai's aid fund of 77 million yuan integrated local water conservancy investment, and landed 33 natural water lifting projects in Yunnan and Guizhou, helping to solve the problem of 82,000 people's domestic water, 64,000 mu of farmland irrigation water, 15,000 large livestock, and 100,000 native chickens.
Every term of poverty alleviation cadres in Shanghai has a special love for this project that is inconspicuous in appearance and has suffered a lot behind it. Its beauty is that the moment the villagers turn on the tap, the water rushes. Some people jokingly call it the "Shanghai plan" for drinking water.
Three
There are a hundred kinds of poverty, and there are a thousand kinds of poverty. At the end of 2020, several local cadres from Xundian County, Yunnan Province, came to the China Urban and Rural Development Research Center of East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai to exchange their experiences in east-west cooperation in poverty alleviation over the years.
The Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, a continuous mountainous area, is often also a deep poverty area.
The secretary of the town party committee recalled that in the face of more than 15,000 poor people, he was very worried at first, and how to do poverty alleviation work was bottomless. There are valuable agricultural and sideline resources here, but because of the rough roads, nothing good can be sold, and they can only rot in the ground. The cooperation between the east and the west to alleviate poverty has brought them hope.
To get rich, build roads first. "One heavenly road and one village", a mountain village with more than 80 families in Xundian County, has been isolated from the world for many years due to road impassability. The environment was harsh, the funds were difficult, and the masses did not cooperate at first and did not want to change. The difficulty of the first step is beyond imagination.
Poverty alleviation cadres do ideological work door to door: we must change the fate of the village and change the fate of future generations. Gradually, the people figured it out, and all the people, horses, and mules in the village gathered together, and everyone tied a safety rope to blast the way... Nowadays, a walled highway leads to the bottom of the mountain, which is a road out of poverty with the spirit of Yugong moving the mountain.
Xundian County is rich in specialties, including konjac, matsutake mushrooms, truffles, seedling chickens, buckwheat above 1,000 meters above sea level, and sweet mineral water at the entrance. Under the east-west cooperative poverty alleviation policy, enterprises counterpart help, these agricultural products enter the Shanghai market, appear in supermarkets, e-commerce platforms and various exhibitions, widely popular.
But that alone doesn't last long. In order to solve the risk of unsalable agricultural products and delayed transportation, poverty alleviation cadres have come up with a clever trick: build cold storage in the local area to extend the preservation time of agricultural products.
It is better to teach people to fish than to teach people to fish, and the cadres did not simply make a one-time investment, but to strengthen local enterprises, turn the cold storage into a village collective asset, absorb employment, and make the cold storage itself an industry, and the benefits are more sustainable.
Ma Liuhui, a researcher at the research center, was very emotional: "East-West cooperation is an equal and reciprocal relationship, not a simple relationship of help and support. "All the resources, ultimately implemented in people, all the collaborative efforts, is to stimulate endogenous motivation, in order to prevent the return to poverty, so that the future is truly sustainable."
Four
To lead the masses out of poverty, party members and cadres themselves must first shed the "three layers of skin." The mouth should be peeled off – publicizing and explaining the various poverty alleviation policies; the feet should be peeled off – walking into the homes of every poor household; the hands should be peeled off – and they want to be together and work together.
For example, the entire village was relocated, and the villagers came into contact with modern urban civilization for the first time, and various unaccustomed to it appeared. Cadres go door to door to understand the ideas of residents, talk about policies and do work "one-on-one", and do not let confusion "ferment";
Carry out employment skills training, some villagers have learned to cook, opened restaurants in front of their homes, can earn 7,000 yuan a month, and never want to go back to the mountains;
Establish a set of incentives, recruit resident volunteers, volunteers who contribute can be scored by the hour, and the accumulated points can be exchanged for shopping offers, material rewards or other service content... With a sense of belonging to the community, the relocated people can "move out, stay stable, and get rich."
On the morning of February 25, 2021, the National Poverty Alleviation Summary and Commendation Conference was held in Beijing. General Secretary Xi Jinping solemnly declared to the world that "through the joint efforts of the whole party and the people of all ethnic groups in the country, at the important moment of ushering in the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, China has won a comprehensive victory in the battle against poverty, and under the current standards, 98.99 million rural poor people have all been lifted out of poverty, 832 poverty-stricken counties have all been removed from the hat, 128,000 poor villages have all been listed, the overall poverty of the region has been solved, the arduous task of eliminating absolute poverty has been completed, and another human miracle has been created in the annals of history!"
In more than 9.6 million square kilometers of land, various resource elements are gathered in rural poor areas; the super-large-scale upper and lower linkage, left and right linkage organizational system, so that the poverty alleviation work system operates efficiently; so many cadres take root in poor areas, so that the poor people have poverty alleviation leaders... The world is wondering, what forces are at work?
In the eyes of many Western economists, poverty is a problem of market failure. But in China, the path out of poverty is a "gradual decline curve", which realizes the organic unity of efficiency and fairness.
Precise and pragmatic, using scientific methods. Solve the problem of "who to support" through "six precisions", solve the problem of "who will support" through the "six precisions", solve the problem of "who will support" through the implementation of "five batches", and solve the problem of "how to retire" through the most rigorous assessment and evaluation. The embroidery of precise policies and the scientific spirit of seeking truth and pragmatism have opened up the "first kilometer" and "last kilometer", and the socialist system with Chinese characteristics and the national governance system have once again written a miracle that shocked the world.
In 2018, concepts such as "targeted poverty alleviation" were written into the resolution on the eradication of rural poverty adopted by the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that targeted poverty alleviation strategies are the only way to help the poor and achieve the ambitious goals set by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Today, China's absolute poverty has been solved; in the future, it will prevent the return to poverty and revitalize the countryside.
Miao embroidery works. Photo by Gong Danyun
On the way out of the Eighteen-Hole Village, we saw the big words standing on the mountainside - "Happiness is all struggle".
The mountain road is rugged but full of hope.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Gong Danyun Text Editor: Gong Danyun Title Map Source: Mountain Road of Eighteen Caves. Photo by Li Maojun
Source: Author: Gong Danyun