How Dongchuan in Yunnan Shook off Poverty

DONGCHUAN District in the northernmost part of Kunming City, Yunnan Province, is famous for its magnificent red soil. It is yet a deeply impoverished region due to the fragility of its ecosystems and exhaustion of resources. Nevertheless, the district successfully got rid of poverty in 2019, a remarkable achievement for the local people. Incidence of poverty there dropped from 52.88 percent in 2013 to zero in 2019.

- WEI BO

Tailored Measures

The district is located at the intersection where the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan meet. As the core area of the economic hub at the lower reaches of the Jinsha River, it connects Kunming to the Sichuan-Chongqing economic circle and the upper Yangtze River economic belt. It is a typical resource-based district relying on the exploiting of copper and other minerals. However, with the change of time, the depletion of resources has gradually become a dilemma restricting its development. In order to first guarantee residential safety for the local people, the district authorities took relocation of poor villages as the first approach to overcome poverty.

In Yinmin Town, there is one such resettlement community, with rows of brand-new highrise buildings built in a mountain valley to provide decent housing for those who were relocated there. Students from the community can take a school bus to and from school. The residents now are enjoying a much better life. According to Lei Yun, the town’s Party chief, the district’s relocation program has placed equal emphasis on living and working, and as a result pushed forward the efforts in relocation, industry cultivation, and employment skill training in a coordinated way to ensure that the resettled people can find jobs and free themselves of poverty. In addition, the local authorities have also worked to ensure that these people will enjoy services in terms of social security, health care, and education.

The relocation program in Dongchuan District involved a total of 32,227 people in 8,754 households, and 95.67 percent of them have been resettled in towns. It has taken the lead in the province in terms of the speed of infrastructure construction, urbanization rate, and followup service guarantee.