Mandarin/Nat As China prepares to bring rich and prospering Hong Kong back into its embrace, the contrast to China's own poverty has never been more striking. By government estimates there are almost 60 (m) million Chinese living below the poverty line -- one of the largest masses of abjectly poor people in the world. In January, Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin renewed a crusade to end rural China's worst poverty by the year 2000. He ordered spending and loans be increased to about one (b)billion U-S dollars annually. But some farmers in southern China's Guangxi Province didn't wait for their government to bail them out. They've now largely helped themselves to leave grinding poverty behind. In the foothills of Guangxi Province's famous karst limestone mountains ten small villages have planted themselves on the slopes. One of the residents, Farmer Mo Shu Xin ("Mo Shu Shin"), was born not far from here -- but to him it's another lifetime away. He lived then in a mountain village where he tried each year to scrape sustenance from less than one acre of corn. All it took was a single hailstorm -- and he and his family could find themselves close to starvation for months. That was before he resettled here, along with his entire mountain village. Five years later, he now spends his days with his family tending a field of mangoes which provide him, for the first time in his life, with a degree of stability. SOUNDBITE: (Mandarin) "Before, I dreamed of a good life but I never believed it would be this good. There were no good policies for us before the opening and reform, so we never even thought of resettlement." SUPER CAPTION: Mo Shu Xin, Farmer Of course, these are the scenes the government is eager to show to foreign television reporters -- and journalists making these visits are never without a number of government escorts. China defines its poorest as those making less than the equivalent of 65 U-S dollars a year. Beyond that severe definition, 300 million Chinese live on the brink, earning less than a dollar a day -- an international poverty standard set by the World Bank. Most of China's poor are minorities pushed to dusty plateaus, steep hillsides and other remote areas by centuries of Chinese migration and conquest. Mo's family are from the Zhuang minority -- which shares close linguistic links with Thailand. His family's annual income has risen from roughly fifty U-S dollars a year to more than one-thousand in the last seven years. Mo's concerns are not anymore for food or shelter -- or even a TV set. He says he spends most of the small profit from his mangoes on schooling for his children -- who he hopes can get good jobs in the township center nearby. But many of the young kids don't want to go. Township officials say all they did was provide some land and roads -- and, recently, electricity and water. The rest was up to the farmers. And while these farmers didn't have access to the rich rice-farming land nearby, they have made the formerly barren hillsides bear fruit. Now, the official says, talk is not of poverty alleviation but of further investment -- and they hope the return of Hong Kong will provide some additional capital. SOUNDBITE: (Mandarin) "Because we have so many mango fields our government offices are all looking forward to overseas investment, for example from Hong Kong and Taiwan, to come inland to invest in processing and preserving the mangoes so that our farmers can increase their incomes." SUPER CAPTION: Huang Pu Chao, Head, Na Po Township But many still live in mountain villages like the one Mo left. Here in Long Yun village there are no smart new brick houses. SOUNDBITE: (Zhuang) You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/5c7a330ec12da459e5bbb6af711ce051 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork

• published: 21 Jul 2015
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