Improving lives together

On Feb 3, 2013, in the runup to the Chinese New Year celebrations, President Xi Jinping visited Yuangudui during an inspection tour of Gansu. Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, provided words of encouragement to the villagers－to work hard together to increase prosperity for the days ahead.

Yuangudui is in Tianjiahe township of Weiyuan county, under Dingxi city. It is comparatively more humid, with a milder highland climate than surrounding mountainous areas, at an altitude of more than 2,400 meters and receiving an average annual rainfall of 508 mm. The village covers 13.2 square kilometers, containing more than 440 households of nearly 2,000 villagers who were living mostly in poverty prior to the major improvements recorded after 2013.

Yuangudui had been at the front lines of the nation's fight to eliminate extreme poverty－defined as living with less than 2,300 yuan in annual income－by the end of this year.

By the end of 2012, more than 220 households with nearly 1,100 villagers were targeted to receive major poverty alleviation measures. Per capita income from agriculture then was 660 yuan, with the per capita net income of farmers at just above 1,465 yuan and the poverty rate as high as 57 percent, according to local government figures.

But in 2016, as anti-poverty measures geared up following Xi's visit, Yuangudui received accolades for being one of the "most beautiful villages" in the province, two years before it shed its poverty label entirely－by the end of 2019, the village no longer recorded any poverty-hit households, with the per capita disposable income of farmers reaching 10,789 yuan.

Weiyuan county itself contains the source of its namesake Weihe river, which is the largest tributary of the mighty Yellow River. The county lies in the central part of Gansu and is a key area for poverty alleviation efforts.

Weiyuan covers more than 2,000 sq km, with a total population of 345,000 including 323,000 residents involved in agriculture.

At the end of 2013, Weiyuan recorded 25,000 poverty-hit households totaling 102,300 people, with the poverty rate at 31.66 percent. In the past six years, 24,700 households totaling 100,400 residents were lifted from poverty, with the poverty rate dropping to 0.43 percent.

Amid the anti-poverty drive, Weiyuan has piped tap water to 22,900 households, including nearly 6,000 poverty-hit households containing about 24,000 residents. It has since attained a 100 percent safe drinking water compliance rate, up 8 percentage points from 2013, local government reported.

In 2019, the county recorded a GDP of about 3.69 billion yuan, up 1.38 billion yuan from that of 2013 and with an average annual growth rate of 6.6 percent.