30/04/2020
– The last nine poverty-stricken county-level regions in east China’s Anhui Province have been removed from the country’s list of impoverished counties.
– This marks that all county-level regions in the Yangtze River Delta, consisting of Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, have been officially lifted out of poverty for the first time in history.
HEFEI, April 29 (Xinhua) — Sitting in front of his smartphone, Zhang Chuanfeng touts dried sweet potatoes to viewers on China’s popular video-sharing app Douyin, also known as TikTok.
“These are made from sweet potatoes I grew myself. They are sweet and have an excellent texture,” said Zhang while livestreaming in Tangjiahui Township of Jinzhai County in east China’s Anhui Province. Tucked away in the boundless Dabie Mountains, the township used to have the biggest poor population in the county.
Aerial photo taken on April 16, 2020 shows residential buildings in Dawan Village of Jinzhai County, east China’s Anhui Province. (Xinhua/Liu Junxi)
Jinzhai County is among the last nine county-level regions in Anhui that have been removed from the country’s list of impoverished counties, according to an announcement issued by the provincial government Wednesday. They are also the last group of county-level regions that bid farewell to poverty in the Yangtze River Delta.
E-COMMERCE
Zhang might seem like a typical e-commerce businessman reaping success in China’s booming livestreaming industry. But his road to success has been a lot bumpier: he suffers from dwarfism.
A little more than 1.4 meters tall, Zhang has a babyface, making him “look like a junior school student,” he said. But the man, 38, is the father of a nine-year-old boy.
For Zhang, life was tough before 2014. “Nobody wanted me because of my ‘disabilities’ when I went out to look for jobs,” he said. “I was turned down again and again.”
Zhang was put on the government’s poverty list in 2014 as China implemented targeted poverty-relief measures. With the help of local officials, he got a bank loan of 10,000 yuan (about 1,400 U.S. dollars) and bought 22 lambs. He tended the animals whole-heartedly and seized every opportunity to learn how to raise them more professionally.
Zhang Chuanfeng feeds his lambs in Zhufan Village of Jinzhai County, east China’s Anhui Province, April 26, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhang Duan)
Within a year, the number of his lambs expanded to hundreds. In 2016, Zhang’s earnings exceeded 100,000 yuan, more than enough for him to cast off poverty.
Riding on this success, Zhang began to seek new opportunities. He rented a shop and started selling products online to embrace an e-commerce strategy the local government introduced in 2017.
More than 100 online shops, including Zhang’s, in the county have helped more than 7,000 poverty-stricken households sell about 73 million yuan worth of local specialties since 2018. Zhang alone earned 500,000 yuan from a sales revenue of 5 million yuan last year.
A villager arranges local specialties for sale at Dawan Village of Jinzhai County, east China’s Anhui Province, April 17, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Junxi)
WICKERWORK SUCCESS
About 100 km north of Jinzhai lies Funan, a place that used to be vulnerable to constant floods.
Zhang Chaoling, who lives by the Huaihe River in Funan County, had to flee her hometown at a young age due to floods, but has flourished on a willow plantation along the river later.
“The land is largely covered by silt following continual flooding in the past. It is an ideal place to plant willows and make wickerwork,” Zhang said.
Zhang left her hometown for Guangzhou in 1993 and found a job in a garment factory. A few years later, she founded a trading company with her husband in Guangzhou, selling wickerwork products from her hometown to other countries.
Zhang returned to her hometown and set up a wickerwork production base in 2011. Funan is famous for its delicate wickerwork. Skilled craftsmen traditionally use local willow as a raw material to weave products such as baskets, furniture and home decorations.
A villager arranges wickerwork products in Funan County, east China’s Anhui Province, April 15, 2020. (Photo by Zhou Mu/Xinhua)
“The flood is well controlled now. I remember the last huge flood came in 2007,” Zhang said.
Taking advantage of the fertile land along the Huaihe River, she plants over 130 hectares of willow trees and employs hundreds of locals mostly in their 50s and 60s.
“I can process 100 to 150 kg of willow twigs per day, from which I make around 80 yuan,” said Geng Shifen, who peels willow twigs with a clamp next to the plantation.
A total of 130,000 people are engaged in the wickerwork industry in Funan, creating an output of nearly 9 billion yuan in 2019, and helping 15,000 locals shake off poverty, local statistics showed.
POVERTY REDUCTION FEAT
The Anhui provincial government Wednesday announced that its last nine county-level regions including Jinzhai and Funan are removed from the country’s list of impoverished counties.
This marks that all 31 impoverished county-level regions in Anhui have shaken off poverty, echoing China’s efforts to eradicate absolute poverty by the end of 2020.
With the announcement, all county-level regions in the Yangtze River Delta have been officially lifted out of poverty for the first time in history.
A bus runs on a rural road in Jinzhai County, east China’s Anhui Province, April 17, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Junxi)
Covering a 358,000-square-km expanse, the Yangtze River Delta, consisting of Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, is one of the most populated and economically dynamic areas in China, contributing one-fourth of the country’s GDP.
Anhui had a population of 63.65 million as of 2019, official data showed. The poor population in the province had decreased from 4.84 million in 2014 to 87,000 in 2019, and the poverty headcount ratio had been reduced from 9.1 percent to 0.16 percent during the period, according to the provincial poverty relief office.
A county can be removed from the list if its impoverished population drops to less than 2 percent, according to a national mechanism established in April 2016 to eliminate poverty in affected regions. The ratio can be loosened to 3 percent in the western region.
By the end of 2019, 5.51 million people in China were still living in poverty.
“We will continue our work to prevent people from returning to poverty, and help the remaining poor population shake off poverty by all means,” said Jiang Hong, director of the Anhui provincial poverty relief office.
Source: Xinhua
Posted in 100, 100,000, 1993, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 7,000, also known as, Anhui, Anhui province, animals, announcement, £500,000, babyface, bank loan, baskets, began, bid farewell, biggest, booming, bought, boundless, boy, bumpier, businessman, cast off, China's, constant, continual, counties, country's, county, county-level, covered, Dabie Mountains, decorations, disabilities, dried sweet potatoes, dwarfism, E-commerce, e-commerce strategy, earnings, east China's, embrace, enough, exceeded, expanded, father, first time, flee, flooding, floods, flourished, following, Funan, Funan County, furniture, garment factory, Guangzhou, helped, History, hometown, households, Huaihe River, hundreds, ideal, impoverished, in front, including, industry, introduced, Jiangsu, Jinzhai County, jobs, lambs, land, last nine, last year, lifted out of poverty, list, livestreaming, Local government, local officials, local specialties, marks, more than, Nobody, officially, online, online shops, opportunity, out of poverty, past, place, Plant, plantation, poor population, popular, poverty, poverty-relief measures, poverty-stricken, products, professionally, provinces, provincial government, raise, reaping, regions, removed, rented, Revenue, Riding, River, road to success, seek, seized, selling, Shanghai, shop, silt, Sitting, Skilled craftsmen, smartphone, started, success, suffers, Tangjiahui Township, tended, TikTok, tough, touts, township, Tucked away, typically, Uncategorized, video-sharing app, viewers, vulnerable, Wednesday, whole-heartedly, WICKERWORK, willow, willows, worth, Xinhua Headlines, Yangtze River Delta, young age, yuan, Zhang, Zhang's, Zhejiang |
Leave a Comment »
16/12/2018
RUCHENG COUNTY, China (Reuters) – In the heart of an impoverished village in southern China, a life-sized statue of Mao Zedong sits on a platform adorned with intricate stonework, flanked by a diorama of Red Army soldiers and traditional brick-and-tile homes with curved roofs.
Shu Zhang Officials have spent a small fortune on the project that has transformed the village of Shazhou, in Hunan province, into an open-air museum dedicated to the Chinese Communist Party. But few tourists have come to peer at the inscription at the foot of Mao’s statue, or take selfies in front of the heroes of the revolution.
The “red tourism” project was the brainchild of the former Communist Party chief of the local county, Rucheng, and cost 300 million yuan (). But it has yet to produce a profit, just like the string of public gardens, town squares and office buildings that the county has built in recent years.
Now the clock is ticking as Rucheng, among China’s poorest counties, and with a population of just 420,400 people, is under pressure to resolve $1 billion in debt, following a decade of credit-fuelled vanity projects, three local officials told Reuters. They requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
To raise funds and conserve cash, Rucheng – which doesn’t have a train station or an airport – has been slashing public investment in infrastructure projects and increasing government land sales to generate revenue, the officials said.
Rucheng is not alone – hundreds of other indebted counties in China are in the same boat. In a recent financial stability report, the central bank said that much of China’s hidden debt risk is held at lower-tier levels, meaning prefectures and counties like Rucheng.
As China prepares this month to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the economic reforms that transformed it into the world’s second-largest economy, fears over local government debt are growing.
China’s local governments had 18.4 trillion yuan of outstanding debt at the end of October, and were estimated by S&P Global Ratings to have up to 40 trillion yuan in off-budget borrowing.
Of particular concern to the authorities as they tackle risks in the financial system are those governments with tiny revenue streams relative to their debt. Their over-reliance on income from land sales is also driving asset bubbles in China.
Rucheng’s free-spending ways came onto Beijing’s radar this year when visiting anti-corruption inspectors were shocked by the contrast between the county’s newly built but deserted municipal district and cramped older areas where residents drink polluted water from ageing pipes.
When the inspectors were in town, numerous anonymous complaints arrived in the mail.
Since 2008, Rucheng has spent billions on 10 office buildings, 11 public gardens and squares and 26 urban roads, the anti-corruption inspectors found. But less than 6 percent of government spending went on investing in industry.
Vanity investments helped drive Rucheng’s debt ratio – or borrowing relative to fiscal revenue – to 336 percent last year from 286 percent in 2016, and 274 percent in 2015.
“We must rectify the problem according to what is required of us, otherwise the local people will not trust our government officials anymore,” said one of the officials.
The head of Rucheng’s Communist Party was sacked for profligate spending and “ignoring the livelihood of the local people”.
Hunan province also placed Rucheng on a “top-level government debt warning list” of counties with debt ratios over 100 percent, the Rucheng officials said.
Local governments on the list face restrictions on taking on new debt, launching new projects, hiring employees and travelling overseas, they said.
RUCHENG CUTS BACK
Since the anti-corruption inspection, Rucheng has suspended, cancelled and scaled back 79 government projects, cutting investment by 2.1 billion yuan, the officials said.
All Rucheng officials have been working seven days a week and meeting regularly with local residents, the three officials said. One official died from overwork, they added.
More than 30 million yuan is also being spent on renovating old water pipes in the area.
To resolve the debt problem, Rucheng has to repay 400 million yuan a year in principle and interest to reduce its outstanding government debt, which was around 9 billion yuan at the end of 2017, an official at Rucheng’s finance and debt department told Reuters.
Rucheng’s debt ratio has since dropped to about 60.6 percent, said the official at its finance department. On Dec. 5, the provincial government lowered Rucheng’s government debt warning level from “first-level” to “second-level”, the officials said.
At the same time, Rucheng officials are under pressure to produce economic growth.
“The higher authorities require us to have zero additional debt but deliver high-quality economic growth,” said a Rucheng official in charge of the economy.
WASHING VEGETABLES, BOILING EGGS
But the legacy of the vanity spending remains.
A mineral bath tourism spot in Rucheng was deserted during a recent visit by Reuters.
Local residents washing vegetables and boiling eggs in the hot springs said the tourism spot, which had cost about 400 million yuan to build, had done little to improve livelihoods.
In nearby Shazhou, which has a population of 500, residents said they had been pressured to sell land at bargain prices to the government for the red tourism project while getting paid only 100 yuan a day as construction workers at the site.
Nations agree on global climate pact rules
White elephant projects built by local governments proliferated across China after the central government pumped trillions of yuan into the economy during the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.
Beijing has since tried to curtail direct borrowing by local governments for such projects, but officials have found ways around the curbs. One widespread method has been the establishment of shell companies known as local government financing vehicles to obtain funds for infrastructure and real estate projects, from which local officials often can profit.
Rucheng had nine such financing vehicles until recently, said the Rucheng finance official, adding that the number had now been cut to two. More than 1 billion yuan in debt was disposed of in that restructuring, he said.
Rucheng still has another 1.4 billion yuan of “mid- to long-term payment obligations”, which will take Rucheng 10 years to repay, the official said.
Despite Rucheng’s large debts, the officials said the county’s 5.36 billion yuan in government bonds presented “no default risk” because they would keep issuing so-called refinancing bonds to roll over the debt.
WOBBLY ECONOMY
The crackdown by Beijing in Rucheng was not only painful for local officials, but it also threatened a fragile local economy that is comprised of agriculture, green industries and eco-tourism.
Like other places in China, Rucheng needs to develop its private sector and new industries to counter a slowing regional economy at a time when government investment is severely constrained, the officials told Reuters.
There are signs that some private capital is entering Rucheng.
In September, the Dongguan Electronic Industry Association in Guangdong signed a 10 billion yuan investment plan to create an industrial park in Rucheng, attracted by cheaper land and labour costs.
That would bring in at least 20 mid-sized electronic firms and create 10,000 local jobs, Guo Peng, manager of the association, told Reuters.
But for Rucheng officials, the fear of being punished for increasing government debt risks has extinguished much of their desire to chase higher economic growth.
Rucheng indicated in August that its growth target for the region would be cut to 8 percent from 10.5 percent.
“We are not taking on any new debt illicitly for construction,” said an official at the county’s Communist Party. “If a local administration raises debt in violation of central government policy, local officials will be held responsible for their entire life.”
Posted in binge, China alert, county, price, Uncategorized, vanity-project |
Leave a Comment »
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 