CNR:

We know that Shibadong village in Hunan province is the birthplace of the initiative of targeted poverty alleviation. Could you please tell us about the current progress in consolidating the achievements of poverty alleviation and how to promote the development of Shibadong village in the process of comprehensively advancing rural revitalization? Thank you.

Mao Weiming:

Thank you for your question. Ms. Zhang will answer this question.

Zhang Yingchun:

Thank you for your concern about consolidating the achievements of poverty alleviation. In recent years, Shibadong village has tailored its strategies based on local conditions, continued to develop industries such as rural tourism, special planting, and Miao embroidery to generate wealth, and blazed a new path for rural revitalization and development. Over the past three years, the per capita net income of villagers has increased from 20,000 yuan to 25,000 yuan, and the income of the village collective economy has grown from 2.68 million yuan to 5 million yuan. Last year, we held the Shibadong Forum on Poverty Reduction and Development in Xiangxi Tujia and Miao autonomous prefecture, sharing Hunan's poverty reduction experience with the world. In the next step, we will mainly focus on three aspects to consolidate and build on our achievements in poverty alleviation and to promote the revitalization of rural areas.

First, we will make efforts to prevent people from falling back into poverty. We have developed a monitoring and assistance management platform to prevent poverty relapse. We have focused on monitoring households that have been lifted out of poverty but whose incomes are below 10,000 yuan, or are declining, as well as those who have been relocated. Through the monitoring and early warning information management system, we will formulate specific assistance plans tailored to individual needs. In this process, we found that among the 520,000 monitored households, 60% are at risk of falling back into poverty due to illness, and one of the important reasons is the lack of public health knowledge. Therefore, in the next step, we will vigorously promote health assistance based on industrial and employment assistance, helping everyone to further increase their knowledge of public health, and conduct graded and classified diagnoses and treatment of diseases, significantly improving the health level of those lifted out of poverty in rural areas.

Second, we will make efforts to develop industries. Hunan is located at 28 degrees north latitude, known as the prime geographical belt for cultivating fruits. It is home to a group of influential public brands such as Anhua Dark Tea, Hunan Black Tea, Hunan Camellia Oil, and Hunan Chili. We will seize this advantage and vigorously promote the development of livestock, aquaculture, vegetables, and traditional Chinese medicines in 15 key counties and 2,307 key villages, making the industries bigger and the people richer. For example, we have a key village, Shazhou village in Rucheng county, where the story of "half a quilt" took place. By vigorously developing rural tourism and special fruit planting, it has achieved 80% employment of villagers not far from home, and its per capita net income has increased by 66% in the past four years.

Third, efforts will be made to increase local residents' income. We will launch a three-year campaign to help villagers who have already been lifted out of poverty gain more money. We will organize more skills training and support programs for people returning to their hometowns so that they can work or start businesses to increase their salary income. Villagers are encouraged to focus on planting or breeding preferable varieties with local characteristics, promoting the courtyard economy and manual workshops as ways to increase operative income. Property income of rural residents is expected to increase through utilizing idle rural assets, developing cold-chain logistics and delivery, and integrating agriculture with cultural industry and tourism. We will continue to increase social insurance subsidies in a steady and prudent manner and adjust other agricultural subsidies to increase villagers' transfer income.

By doing so, the increased income of villagers who have already been lifted out of poverty could exceed 2 percentage points more than that of local rural residents. That's my introduction. Thank you.