CHENGBEI GAN’EN, China – Under a portrait of President Xi Jinping, Ashibusha sits in his freshly painted living room, cradled to her baby next to a chair classified as a “government gift. “
The mother of three is one of 6,600 members of the Yi ethnic minority who have been displaced from 38 mountain villages in southwest China to a newly built city as a component of an anti-poverty initiative.
Farmers who kept plots on the mountainside were given work on an apple plantation. Children who in the past only spoke their language, Nuosu, attend kindergarten in Mandarin, the official language of China.
“Everyone’s together,” 26-year-old Ashibusha.
While other countries are investing in the progression of poor areas, Beijing does not hesitate to operate on a more ambitious scale by moving communities wholesale and building new cities in its effort to modernize China. end excessive poverty until the end of the year, before the centenary of its founding in 2021.
The party says such projects have helped pull millions of people out of poverty, but may require radical changes that uproot entire communities and fuel court cases that the party seeks to erase cultures by pressuring minorities to adopt citizens’ language and way of life. Han, which account for more than 90% of China’s population.
While the party faces protests by academics in northern Inner Mongolia of China over plans for the use of the Mongolian language in schools, officials must demonstrate that they are sensitive to minority cultures.
They invited the hounds to make a stop at Chengbei Gan’en and 4 other villages – Xujiashan, Qingshui, Daganyi and Xiaoshan – which are part of what the government is a successful progression assignment for the Yi in Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province.
The initiative is one of the burdens introduced over the more than 4 decades for prosperity from prosperous east China to the countryside and west.
Massive re-locations are still taking place because some mountainous regions are too isolated, said Wang Sangui, president of China’s Poverty Reduction Research Institute at Renmin University in Beijing.
“It’s solving the challenge of absolute poverty without relocation,” he said.
In Sichuan, which includes some of China’s poorest regions, 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) has been spent relocating 1. 4 million people, according to Peng Qinghua, the party’s provincial secretary, which included the structure of 370,000 new homes and more. 110,000 kilometers (68,000 miles) of rural roads.
In Gbei Gan’en, 420 million yuan ($60 million) was spent to build 1,440 apartments in 25 white buildings, a clinic, a kindergarten and a nursing home.
Craftsmen sell silver jewellery, painted cow skulls and classic clothing popular with Han tourists. Yi women can examine nannies, a world-class career in urban China, in courses taught with pink plastic dolls.
Symptoms of the road invite other people to speak the official language. “Mandarin, please, after entering kindergarten. ” “Speak Mandarin well, it is suitable for everyone. ” “They all speak Mandarin, the flower of civilization blooms everywhere. “
The artwork in the buildings depicts the Yi with members of most Han in friendly scenes. A sample of a baby holding a center with the symbol of the sickle and hammer of the ruling party.
In one village, Xujiashan, the annual household source of income increased from 1,750 yuan ($260) in 2014 to 11,000 yuan ($1,600), according to its undersecretary, Zhang Lixin.
Development projects can create political tensions as many have strategic objectives such as strengthening minority spaces by encouraging nomads to establish themselves or dilute the local population with foreigners.
In Inner Mongolia, academics boycotted categories this month because of plans to update Mongolian textbooks with Chinese textbooks.
The party faces similar court cases over the suppression of local languages in Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang in the northwest. Xinjiang’s Han Party secretary said in 2002 that the language of the Uighurs, their most populous ethnic group, was “out of tune with the 21st century” and abandoned in favor of Mandarin.
The party leader of Liangshan Prefecture stated that his initiative is not purely economic.
The government needs “obsolete habits,” said official Lin Shucheng, who indexed court cases about extravagant gifts, too many animals sacrificed for funerals, and poor hygiene.
“We are fighting the classical forces of habit,” he said.
At the same time, officials of the ruling party say they are preserving nuosu, a Yi language, through bilingual education in schools and government for a Nuosu newspaper and television show.
“We and advertise the learning, use and progression of the Yi language,” the party’s provincial secretary Peng told reporters.
The party is willing to announce Nuosu because, unlike Tibet or Xinjiang, the Yi are not calling for any political change, said Stevan Harrell, a University of Washington anthropologist who has spent more than three decades visiting and reading the region.
“There is no ‘splittism’ in Liangshan,” said Harrell, the party’s term for activists who need more autonomy for Tibet and Xinjiang.
“So it’s pretty safe to have the Yi language as a means of education,” Harrell said. “And this marks problems for the government that they oppose that other people rightly point out that the Uighur and Tibetan languages are seriously suppressed.
The region, like the rest of China, has suffered from the coronavirus epidemic, said Lin, leader of the Liangshan party, but said anti-poverty paintings have returned to normal and that the government was confident they could meet official deadlines.
Older villagers welcome improving living standards.
“You can eat whatever you want now,” said Wang Deying, an 83-year-old grandmother and a five-year-old girl. “Now even pigs eat rice. “
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AP researchers Yu Bing in Beijing and Chen Si in Shanghai contributed to the report.
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