Villagers embrace new life in SW China's Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture

Aerial photo taken on Oct. 13, 2020 shows a view of Sanhe Village in southwest China's Sichuan Province. (Xinhua/Zhang Xiaoyu)

People in Sanhe Village in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, have embraced a new life thanks to various poverty alleviation measures.

In early 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the then impoverished village and discussed targeted poverty alleviation.

The village has since become a tourist destination, with asphalt roads connecting each household and rows of new brick houses built with well-decorated walls.

Looking at it today, it is hard to believe it was once a poverty-stricken village with unsurfaced roads and houses built with adobe.

Sanhe Village still had 792 impoverished people from 148 households in 2020. To lift the village out of poverty, Li Kai was appointed as the first Party secretary in the village. Since then, Sanhe Village has explored different development paths.

“We established an agricultural planting and animal husbandry mode that integrates short, medium and long-term development needs, and regarded developing industries as a key to prosperity,” said Li.

Li said that in the short term, local officials have encouraged young and middle-aged villagers to work outside the village and gain practical skills. Meanwhile, by leveraging its unique natural conditions, Sanhe Village has introduced superior cattle and bee varieties, and local agricultural products with relatively higher output value, such as Sichuan peppers, have continued to emerge.

Thanks to these efforts, the per capita disposable income of local villagers who walked out of poverty has increased from 4,615.5 yuan (about $680) in 2018 to 13,678 yuan in 2021.

Sanhe Village has implemented a campaign to establish a mechanism for cultivating role models in achieving prosperity. Luogu Youge, deputy secretary of the Party branch in Sanhe Village, is such a role model, and he aims to help farmers scale up their breeding business so they can then help other villagers and achieve common prosperity.

He is optimistic about the future of the village because of the sustainable development of the agricultural planting, animal husbandry, and contract farming. He aims to bring better development to the village by building green brands in the future.

After cooperating with ecological agricultural companies, Sanhe Village’s tourism sector has embarked on a stable track of development, attracting more and more tourists. In 2020, Sanhe Village was listed as one of 100 key rural tourism villages in Sichuan. The former site of the village was also listed as a protected cultural site under provincial-level protection, becoming one of the teaching bases for the Sichuan Long March Executive Leadership Academy.

“We will vigorously develop rural tourism by combining our village’s former site, current site and the village history museum to embark on a path of rural vitalization,” said Li.

Now, the village is developing tourism routes featuring the culture of the Yi ethnic group. It will build more B&Bs, hotels and stores to provide more job opportunities for villagers and boost their incomes.