Moving 1.88m huge anti-poverty victory

Guizhou province had relocated 1.88 million people by November as part of a poverty relief project set up for the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), the provincial government said on Monday.

About 82 percent of those relocated were poverty-stricken, officials said.

Xu Min, deputy head of Guizhou's ecological migration office, said the Guizhou relocation has been an unprecedented task and the largest relocation in China.

With great effort, the task was completed, and the creation of infrastructure to support the new residents, as well as providing a good welfare system, is ongoing.

The Chinese government pledged in 2014 to enact more supportive policies to lift the country's poorest 70 million people above the poverty line by the end of 2020.

Relocating people who live in virtually uninhabitable places, such as deep in the mountains and deserts, is one of the methods to help people break the cycle of poverty.

The residents of Ameiqituo, a small town in the province, were moved from the village of Sanbaoxiang two years ago. Up to 59 percent of Sanbaoxiang's population of 5,850, from 1,274 families, were extremely poor in 2014.

Wen Anmei, a villager and dancer in Sanbaoxiang, said her family now has a much better life.

"There is convenient transportation in Ameiqituo. Hospitals and schools are all near home," she said. "I got a job in a tourist company in town with a monthly salary of 3,800 yuan ($542), which would have been hard to imagine in the past.

"Even my mom and dad both got their jobs thanks to the local government."

She said her mom became a cleaner with a salary of 1,800 yuan a month and her dad is a forest ranger with monthly income of 800 yuan.

The local government has been making efforts to help all the immigrants find jobs. In the past two years, the authority has been developing farming, chicken breeding and herbal cultivation to employ all the impoverished from the village.