Self-help crucial to combat poverty

For many poor households, leaving the village to find work is the most effective means of escaping from dire poverty. Life can be improved quickly if the family has one or two members working elsewhere. Therefore, many local governments see providing labor services as an important tool to increase incomes for the poor.

However, some healthy young people choose to cling to the barren mountains instead of leaving in search of work. Illiteracy, lack of skills, and poor Putonghua or standard Chinese are factors deterring them from leaving.

Longmen, Longbu and Qiniao are three villages in Longzhou County of Guangxi that still don’t have road access. It takes three hours of foot to reach the most remote village, Qiniao, and at least two hours to reach the nearest one, Longmen. The reporters are hot and sticky after less than an hour of climbing. They come across Huang Guoping, a poor villager who is rather different from the others because he is in his early forties and in good health. But he is still single, and has two younger brothers who are also single. All five members of his family depend on government allowance for a living.

“Why don’t you leave the village?” asks a reporter. “You might just find your Miss Right.”

“It would be very difficult for me to find a job since I have never been to school,” answers Huang. His two younger brothers both dropped out of school at very early age and the whole family depends on farming and raising cattle for their livelihood. They travel out of the village about every two weeks to buy daily necessities. No girl is willing to marry the men from this village because it is stranded in the depths of remote mountains.

Pantu is a poor village in Yalong Town of Dahua Yao Autonomous County. 51-year old Wei Jianzhan doesn’t worry about his desperate situation—he would rather casually drop into the conversation that he has four sons, more than his father and his grandpa had.

The local party chief is trying to create a platform for idle laborers over the age of 50, finding them work in local enterprises. Middle-aged villagers in good health like Wei could at least work as couriers.

But this opportunity is not attractive to Wei. “If I left the village I would have to get used to eating rice. I have lived on corn all my life,” he says.