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
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02/02/2020
- An Airbus A380 landed at the military base of Istres in the southern French region of Bouches-du-Rhone on Sunday
- Of the 180 French people who were flown back from Wuhan on Friday, one showed symptoms of being infected with the virus
An Airbus A380-84, believed to be carrying European citizens flown out from the coronavirus zone in Wuhan, approaches the Istres-Le Tube Air Base near Istres. Photo: AFP
A second French-chartered plane carrying 300 evacuees from China flew to France on Sunday as more foreigners fled China’s rapidly developing virus.
The Airbus A380 landed at the military base of Istres in the southern French region of Bouches-du-Rhone. A first French plane landed Friday.
Officials said that when this latest flight left the central Chinese city of Wuhan, none of the passengers had symptoms of coronavirus. They include French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Czechs, Slovaks and some citizens of African countries.
Authorities said the plane would drop off most of its passengers at Istres before leaving for Belgium with several dozen people from northern Europe. Authorities haven’t said if the travellers arriving at Istres will be put into quarantine.
Of the 180 French people who were flown back from Wuhan on Friday, one showed symptoms of being infected with the virus and was sent to a Marseille hospital for testing, French Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said.
The other passengers were being quarantined for 14 days at a large, isolated Mediterranean resort not far from Marseille near Carry-le-Rouet.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn said that two people who were flown back to Germany on Saturday were found to be infected with the virus. That brought the total of cases in Germany to 10. Spahn said the two had been symptom-free when they left Wuhan and when they arrived in Frankfurt, and that they were “doing well at the moment” in quarantine at a Frankfurt hospital.
French police officers gather at the entrance gate of the ENSOSP (French National Fire Officers Academy) where French citizens will be quarantined after their repatriation from Wuhan. Photo: EPA-EFE
Europe has 25 reported cases of people who have been infected with the virus that emerged from Wuhan: Germany has 10; France has six; Russia, Italy and the U.K have two each and Finland, Sweden and Spain each have one.
The Italian foreign ministry said permission had been given for cargo flights to fly between Italy and China.
Separately, the special commissioner in charge of coordinating Italy’s efforts during the viral outbreak said consideration was being given to letting a handful of Chinese commercial airliners fly to Italy to pick up Chinese tourists and other Chinese citizens stranded in Italy by the suspension of commercial flights.
The commissioner, Angelo Borrelli, was quoted by Italian media as saying that Italy would like those flights, if approved, not to fly to Italy empty, but instead to bring back Italians from China. There are an estimated 500 other Italians in China who have apparently expressed an interest in returning home during the outbreak, but nothing firm had been decided on those flight possibilities.
Meanwhile, an estimated 3,000 tourists and others from China are stranded in Italy and want to return to home, according to Italian media.
Coronavirus: Indonesia evacuates citizens, stops flights from China
The death toll in China climbed Sunday to 304 and the number of infections rose to 14,380. In addition, the Philippines on Sunday reported the first death from the virus outside China.
On Saturday night, a Turkish military transport plane carrying 42 people arrived in Ankara from Wutan. The 32 Turkish, six Azerbaijani, three Georgian and one Albanian nationals will remain under observation in a hospital for 14 days, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said.
Twenty Turkish personnel who took part in the evacuation will also be kept in quarantine.
The Egyptian government said 306 of its nationals would return home from Wuhan on a chartered plane later Sunday and will be subject to a 14-day quarantine. The online news outlet Masrawy reported that authorities prepared a hotel in the northwestern city of Marsa Matruh where the returnees would be quarantined.
Source: SCMP
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17/09/2019
- Hangzhou subway operator says water seeped into underground construction site
- Zhejiang’s capital was scene of subway collapse that claimed 21 workers’ lives in 2008
A yellow cloud engulfs buildings after a subway tunnel in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, collapses. Photo: Pear Video
Homes in a major city in eastern China were evacuated on Wednesday after water seepage at a subway construction site caused a main road to cave in and cut a gas main.
Authorities in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, said dozens of residents feared for their homes as buildings cracked and swayed from the cave-in.
Videos posted to the Weibo microblogging network showed yellow smoke engulfing the neighbourhood as the road fell below street level. Authorities said Hangzhou’s gas supplier managed to close off the mains.
Hangzhou Metro Group, the city’s subway operator and the company overseeing the network’s expansion from four lines to nine for the 2022 Asian Games, said on Weibo that water seeped into a tunnel that connected two stations in the centre of the city, leading to the collapse.
The collapse took down a four-lane road in central Hangzhou. Photo: Pear Video
That caused a hole under the carriageway and took the pavement down with it. Hangzhou Metro said homes around the site were cleared and authorities were monitoring for further danger.
It was not known how many residents were affected, but no casualties were reported.
Most residents were put up in a nearby school until accommodation could be arranged, the City Express newspaper reported, adding that several truckloads of cement were poured into the hole.
Eight Chinese killed as road collapses near subway construction project
The road collapse in central Hangzhou was the latest in a series of subway construction accidents there – some of them deadly – in the past decade as China races to expand its urban rail networks.
In November 2008, 21 workers were killed and 24 were injured when a tunnel Hangzhou’s Line 1 collapsed beneath an eight-lane road and river water rushed in. A court sent eight people to jail for terms of between three and 5½ years for negligence at the site.
Two years later at the same place, a truck driver died and another was injured as a pit collapsed.
In 2016, four construction workers were killed when mud flooded a pit at a station on Line 4.
In 2008, an eight-lane riverside road in Hangzhou fell in on workers building a subway tunnel, killing 21. Photo: AFP
A cave-in similar to Wednesday’s collapse overturned a truck at a construction site near Hangzhou railway station this month, but no one was injured, Hangzhou Metro said.
According to the China Association of Metros, by the end of last year, more than 5,700km (3,540 miles) of urban railway had been built in 35 mainland cities, of which more than a third – 2,100km – was completed since 2015.
Source: SCMP
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