Huize: Relocated villagers live a better life

This winter, 159 households from six villages in the Baoyun Subdistrict, northeast Yunnan's Huize County, were relocated from the inhospitable mountainous area. The 636 villagers have become the first residents to settle in Phase II of the Huize New City Poverty Alleviation Relocation Apartments.

Li Fenying, 73, could not help but sing of this new life, "It is good to move to the new city, where young people can find jobs, children can study at school, the elderly have enough to eat, and everyone is living a happy life..." The other residents warmly applauded the melodious singing.

Mountainous areas account for 95.7 percent of Huize. In the county, about 380,000 people live in remote, rocky, high and cold mountainous areas, some of them in areas at risk of landslides and mud-rock flows. Among them, 122,500 people in 42,000 households live in poverty. It is a great challenge to lift them out of poverty.

Huize County has been relocating disadvantaged people from inhospitable areas as an important strategy toward poverty alleviation. From 2016 to 2020, according to Tan Lihua, party secretary of the county, Huize will build 125 relocation sites to relocate 105,068 people. These include 83,627 registered disadvantaged people. So far, Huize has already built 119 relocation sites in various townships and has relocated 23,811 people.

In Huize New City, our reporter saw some relocated people working on construction sites. Others were making clothes in workshops, cultivating strawberries at the planting base, and some were attending employability training sessions. Children were studying at nearby schools and old people were enjoying themselves in the cultural square.

(Text by Xinhua; Photos from Yunnan Daily)