The title image is from IC photo
On February 25, 2021, at the National Poverty Alleviation Summary and Commendation Conference, General Secretary Xi Jinping solemnly declared: my country’s poverty alleviation battle has won an all-round victory, completed the arduous task of eradicating absolute poverty, and created another world that shines in the annals of history. miracle!
Poverty alleviation is a major problem that has plagued us for a long time.
In 2015, poverty expert Li Xiaoyun took root in Hebian Village, a poverty-stricken Yao village in Mengla County, Yunnan, and launched poverty alleviation in the village, creating a riverside poverty alleviation model with compound industries and comprehensive treatment of deep poverty. Hebian Village was lifted out of poverty in 2018. Become a well-known poverty alleviation village in the country.
As a well-known development scientist at home and abroad, Li Xiaoyun has collected more than 20 years of poverty alleviation experience in the book “The End of Poverty”, witnessing China’s poverty alleviation from a micro perspective. The whole process. The following content is a record of poverty alleviation in Hebian Village, extracted from “The End of Poverty” (CITIC Press, published in May 2021).
Rebuild a “system”: build a new Yao wooden building
It’s summer in Hebian Village in March. After sunset, the mountains cool off. In this Yao village hidden deep in the rainforest of southern Yunnan, dozens of wooden buildings are gradually extinguished. The black mountain road was suddenly illuminated by headlights.
During the day, the village had just received a large inspection group. Li Xiaoyun gave a report to the guests, telling how the Hebian Village was transformed. The villagers arranged the venue and prepared group meals, and they were busy until dark. Four years ago, since Li Xiaoyun, a professor at China Agricultural University, brought his teachers and students to live in, the entire village rushed like a clockwork, and more than 200 people in the village were very busy.
Li Xiaoyun lives in Poding, and the villagers call him Teacher Li, only Xiaoyong jokingly calls him “Old Man Li”. He felt that Li Xiaoyun had grown a lot in recent years, and his hair had turned white. Everyone in the village knows that Li Xiaoyun is not sleeping well. As soon as he lay down, he couldn’t help thinking about the things in the stockade. He wanted to rebuild a “system”.
Li Xiaoyun first came to Hebian Village, Mengban Town, Mengla County, Xishuangbanna Prefecture, Yunnan Province in early 2015. At that time, Mengla County was still a state-level poor county, and the Hebian Village backed by the rain forest did not have a good road. When it rained, the villagers would be blocked by water.
2015In March, Li Xiaoyun registered the charity organization “Xiaoyun Poverty Aid Center” (hereinafter referred to as “Xiaoyun Poverty”) in Mengla County, and recruited With three full-time staff and many volunteers, his colleagues and doctoral students from the Agricultural University have also entered the village one after another. The teachers and students lived in an abandoned wooden house, which was also Li Xiaoyun’s first office.
Once, this kind of wooden house was the most common house in the village-surrounded by wooden planks and built with asbestos tiles, it was small and had no windows, and the door was open for light. At that time, it was also common for people and animals to live together. The villagers used to raise pigs and chickens freely and kept them in their houses at night.
Now, this old office has become a rarity, and Li Xiaoyun keeps it as a “museum.” “I can’t come in and see the past now. Only the villagers know about the changes.” At present, most of the 57 households in the village have built new wooden buildings, with two and three floors, and the area of a single storey generally exceeds 100 square meters. Meter.
The local relocation policy was implemented in Hebian Village in the second half of 2015. Housing planning in the village became more concentrated, and villagers began to build new houses. The Hebian Village was moved from elsewhere in 1982. After more than 30 years, the traditional wooden houses are generally dilapidated, but due to economic pressure, no family has built a new house.
At that time, Li Xiaoyun’s team came up with their own planning plan-to build a wooden building for the Yao nationality.
“There is no decent house in the whole village.” This is Li Xiaoyun’s first impression of Hebian Village. In August 2015, in that dilapidated office, Li Xiaoyun took out a picture and discussed with the villagers about their future house.
Before building a new house, Li Xiaoyun and the villagers had a meeting to discuss the planning plan. “I told the volunteers that we must make colorful and beautiful houses.” Li Xiaoyun still remembered the meeting scene that day. In the dilapidated and dim office, he projected the design drawings to the villagers, who were barefoot. , Sitting on the ground, the colorful pictures are very large.
“It’s so high, I look scared.” Some villagers reflected. At that time, many people did not believe that they could live in such a house.
Deng Xuemei’s family was the first person to eat crabs. At that time, her family was preparing to build a house, and the wood was almost stocked. After Li Xiaoyun communicated several times, her family became a “model household” for the Yao people’s new home.
The newly planned house design still follows the traditional Yao nationality’s dry fence-style wooden buildings, which is convenient for local materials. The wooden building is made of wood from the beams to the surrounding walls. But this kind of wooden building is very tall, and the villagers have never seen such a house before, worrying about not being able to build it.
When the actual construction starts, the villagers’ houses will grow bigger and bigger, and the first “demonstration household” to test the water is now the smallest house in the village.
In the process of building “demonstration households”, there are many villagers who help workers and onlookers. Soon, another batch of new houses started, and the villagers began to “be bold.” From the end of 2015 to mid-2017, the entire stockade became a large construction site, and the chain saw was buzzing. Looking back at that time, someone called back pain.
To build a wooden building, it will take three to five months to prepare the wood, cut trees from the collective forest, change them into pieces of logs on the spot, carry them to the side of the road, hire a car to bring them back to the village… The beams, planks, window panes, fences, and houses of every household were built by the villagers themselves.
Xiaoyong’s family is the first group of people to build houses after the “model households”. Initially, the family planned to build a single-story building of 90 square meters, but it was actually built. The single-story building reached more than 130 square meters, and finally three floors were built.
So far, 46 of the 57 households in the village have been completed, and a few more are under construction.
Create high-end new formats and strive to get rid of the “poverty trap”
Li Xiaoyun has been pondering the design of Yao nationality wooden buildings for half a year. He found that the old houses of the local Yao people had no windows and no sunlight, because there was only wood in the mountains, no glass or bricks. The old houses leaned on the cracks in the boards to let in sunlight, and the villagers had to go outside to bask in the sun. Therefore, he wanted to build a house full of sunshine and Yao characteristics, which could also be used as a guest room to make money.
“Yao mother’s guest room” is a public welfare project of Xiaoyun’s poverty alleviation team. Through the funding of social forces, they help farmers to nest a “guest room” in their homes, which can be used for accommodation business and not Affect their normal life.
This design is very “careful”. “When we first went to the riverside village, there was no space for us outsiders, so we slowly infiltrated something into the village.” Li Xiaoyun hopes that it is the local Yao culture that surrounds the foreign culture, not the other way around.
In the new residence built, the villagers still grilled the brazier and smoked dry cigarettes in the raised floor below the wooden building, but the family has since then had a separate bathroom and kitchen. In addition to guest rooms, the village is also equipped with a conference center, restaurants, bars, etc., mainly to receive high-end conferences and nature education summer camps.
“It’s not low-end tourism, no barbecue, no catering, but high-end innovation through supply-side innovations.”Li Xiaoyun set the room price per night300 to 1,000 yuan, “only a little money can not solve the problem”. After entering the village, Li Xiaoyun organized the students to visit and investigate from house to house. They found that almost every family in the village was in debt. In 2015, the per capita disposable income of Hebian Village was 4,303 yuan, and the per capita debt was 3,049 yuan. Expenditure was mainly concentrated on daily consumption, education, and medical care, all of which were rigidly needed and difficult to reduce. The diagnosis in the investigation report is that Hebian Village has fallen into a “poverty trap”, without a substantial increase in income, it will not be able to get rid of poverty.
“Why is it called a’poverty trap’? That is to say, even at a higher growth rate of 9%, the villagers of Hebian Village will not be able to pay off their debts until 2021. If there are additional expenses such as sickness and education, Living conditions will deteriorate further.” Li Xiaoyun said.
As a result, a riverside experiment began. The teachers and students hope to explore a way to pull the villagers out of this trap.
After the “Yao mother room” was completed and put into use, from 2017 to 2018, the village’s new income from guest rooms and kitchens reached 800,000 yuan, with an average household income of 13,000 yuan, and many farmers’ new income was as high as 30000.
In the spring of 2018, Li Xiaoyun felt that the development of Hebian Village began to encounter real difficulties.
At that time, he called the villagers for a meeting, which was rare. In the past three years, he has only convened two meetings with villagers. At the meeting, Li Xiaoyun asked the villagers: “If I and the other teachers are withdrawn, can you still have this income?” As soon as he finished speaking, many farmers said in unison: “Teacher Li, you can’t leave! “
In the past year or so, Li Xiaoyun and his colleagues and students have been busy surrounding the “Yao Mother’s Room”, contacting various sources, signing various contracts, and doing everything possible to issue invoices. The group guests came, and the teachers and students were almost all receptionists.
In this process, the villagers hardly participated. “It’s not that we don’t want them to participate, but that farmers can’t do all these tasks. This is a real deep water area for poverty alleviation.” Li Xiaoyun said.
Author: Li Xiaoyun
Generate modern employment and retain more young people
Before the Spring Festival of 2019, under the leadership of Xiaoyun Helping the Poor, the village registered and established the “Yulin Yaojia Professional Cooperative”. The current main business is the “Yao Mother Guest Room”. At the inaugural meeting, villager Yin Wengang said: “My brain is empty, it feels like a child, and I’m not used to it.” In recent months, they are learning to use Excel to make charts. In the past, they had never touched a computer.
26-year-old Zhou Zhixue is the CEO of the cooperative (CEO). Before returning to the village to build a house, he worked outside for nearly 10 years. He drilled wells, worked as a porter, and finally started to learn how to cook. He knew all about Sichuan cuisine, Cantonese cuisine, and Anhui cuisine. He could use a computer to type. The keyboard was always Appears “disobedient”.
“Leting young people back to the village is not to’plant land’ to engage in agriculture. Land must be planted, but so many young people cannot cultivate land. New industries in the villages are needed to rejuvenate the villages with the integration of the tertiary industries.” Li Xiaoyun said, ” We want to make the countryside generate modern value. Even the people in the city want to come, and the young people in the village don’t want to leave. Young people are a group that tends to be modern. It is not urban space that attracts young people, but income and modern employment. Culture, let the office of the village cooperative be the same as the venture capital space in the city, they don’t want to leave.“
So, Li Xiaoyun and his colleagues decorated the office of the cooperative in the village like the one in the city, letting “foreign” enter the “earth” and letting the village have its own CEO.
In the village, Xiaoyun’s office for helping the poor was built halfway up the mountain, which is also the office of the cooperative. Computers, printers, and meeting rooms are all available in the house. In Li Xiaoyun’s view, it is more likely to retain more young people only if modern employment is created in the village.
Li Xiaoyun said frankly that whether the Hebian Village experiment is sustainable or not is still a question. In the future, it is still unknown whether the farmers will be able to operate the cooperative. In his view, the only hopeThe ability to be light-hearted is cultivated.
Every detail must be taught from scratch
Usually, the teachers of the Agricultural University go out to work, and try to bring Zhou Zhixue with them, so that they can learn to deal with government departments and various agencies, and every detail must be taught from the beginning.
At the recent meeting, Teacher Dong Qiang gave Zhou Zhixue some advice-not to smoke. He hoped that Zhou Zhixue could be a little different from other villagers, so he never smoked.
In Hebian Village, almost all the men smoke and drink at home. In the daily expenditure of households in the village, tobacco and alcohol account for the largest proportion, accounting for 25% of the total. The young and middle-aged men in the village almost buy a pack of cigarettes a day, the price ranges from 8 to 11 yuan, and they spend almost 3,000 yuan on buying cigarettes a year.
Some people from outside the village will say: “They know that smoking and drinking, they deserve to be poor!” Li Xiaoyun asked the villagers if they could smoke less and save some. However, the villagers said that firewood and cigarettes burned away their fatigue and worries for the day. At night, when Li Xiaoyun and the villagers were roasting and chatting together, they would smoke more and more cigarettes.
Li Xiaoyun gradually understood that, letting the villagers sacrifice drinking and smoking in exchange for saving money is destined to be a futile effort.
In this closed mountain village, the entire village is a large group of kinsmen. Welfare sharing and egalitarianism are the village’s survival ethics: whether to build a house or collect sugar cane, the villagers must help each other, and the owner takes care of the food every day. , Control wine, prepare cigarettes.
How to get rid of poverty sustainably?
The four years of living together made Li Xiaoyun understand that this type of village still faces many challenges in sustainable poverty alleviation in the future.
As early as two years ago, Li Xiaoyun won the “2017 National Poverty Alleviation Award” for the poverty alleviation innovation of the Hebian Village Project. Today, the project has become more and more perfect and has become a model for many related organizations and groups to visit and inspect.
In the 1980s, Li Xiaoyun began to engage in rural policy research in the Rural Policy Research Office of the former Secretariat of the Central Committee. After that, he served as the head of the institution in the School of Rural Development of China Agricultural University and the School of Humanities Development.
After studying the theory of poverty alleviation for more than 20 years, he finally chose to squat in a village. In Li Xiaoyun’s view, this is a lesson he learned by himself. Hebian Village is where he hopes to transform the traditionalAn experiment in connection with modern times.
A village is a small society, with struggles and politics in it. Li Xiaoyun has always been able to “settle things” in the village. On the one hand, due to his unconventional investment, on the other hand, he deliberately keeps his distance. I don’t want to fall into a special relationship with individual villagers, but always maintain an independent perspective of research.
For many years, Li Xiaoyun often felt the villagers’ kindness from the heart–he didn’t sleep well. In summer nights, young people went to the surroundings of the house to help him catch crickets. Even if he lay down, Li Xiaoyun’s brain could not be idle, he could not help but ponder the work in the village.
Sometimes, Li Xiaoyun will complain to Uncle Li, saying that he is too tired. Li Fulin watched Li Xiaoyun grow old. In the past few years, Li Fulin has also felt in a daze. The village is always busy, as if it is the Spring Festival every year.
In 4 years, the fate of many people has quietly changed. Zhou Zhixue, a young migrant worker, became the general manager of the agricultural cooperative, five villagers became restaurant owners, more than 40 villagers became homestay owners, and a dozen preschoolers became kindergarten students.
On the second floor of Xiaoyun’s Poverty Alleviation Office, they opened a free children’s activity center. As the village’s kindergarten, the 18-year-old village girl Deng Ying became a kindergarten teacher—this was after she graduated from junior high school. First job.
Every morning, Deng Ying takes the children to read an ancient poem: “Far away on the stone path of the cold mountain, there are people in the white clouds.”
In the kindergarten, the children who grew up in the novel Yaohua gradually learned Mandarin, even speaking better than some elementary school students outside the village. When encountering the guests of the summer camp, the children become small guides in the rainforest. They never admit to being born. They will take the initiative to say hello when they see people. They are also used to asking, “Are you from Beijing?” In the past few years, many Beijing have come to Beijing. Teachers and students of all settled in Hebian Village, which is called “Little Beijing” in the town.
Nowadays, Li Xiaoyun spends less and less time in Beijing. He and several experts funded the construction of a professor’s workstation on the top of the mountain. Since then, he has been resident, and the guest rooms of this workstation have become a source of collective income for the village. The riverside conference hall and expert workstation rooms have brought nearly 100,000 yuan in income to the village collective.
In Li Xiaoyun’s view, it is still impossible to truly evaluate the success of the Hebian Village experiment. “After a few decades, we will look back.”