Chongqing's 120,000 km of roads underpin rural hopes for prosperity
Xinhua News Agency, Chongqing, June 1 (Dispatch)Headline: "Roads are the way out for mountain people" - Chongqing's 120,000 km of roads underpin rural hopes for prosperity
Xinhua reporters Han Zhen, Ke Gaoyang, Hu Ruohan
Over 4 years, 40 billion yuan was invested, 42,000 km of rural roads were newly built, and the total length of rural roads reached 123,000 km... To help the people escape poverty and achieve prosperity, in recent years Chongqing has steadily advanced the "accessibility and smoothness project." All 11,000 merged villages have achieved road access, and more than 8,000 administrative villages have achieved smooth road access, opening up the "last kilometer" of transportation, breaking through development "bottlenecks," and enabling rural areas to gradually bid farewell to "poverty amid plenty."
Increase investment and strengthen rural road network construction
No one understands the importance of roads better than the villagers of Xiazhuang Village. Xiazhuang in Wushan, at the border of Chongqing and Hubei, is a village nestled in a "heavenly pit" (tiankeng), and in order to build a road leading out of the village, 6 villagers sacrificed their lives.
Chongqing, with its high mountains and deep valleys, is cut off by poor transportation, and vast resources "hidden deep in the mountains go unrecognized," which is an important cause of local rural poverty. Twenty years ago, villagers of Xiazhuang had to spend seven or eight hours traveling to the town and back. More than one-tenth of the villagers had never left the village, and the villagers struggled even to have enough food and clothing. "Roads are the way out for mountain people!" said Mao Xianglin, director of the Xiazhuang Village Committee, who wrote letters calling on all the labor force in the village to build the road.
At that time, the local government was very poor and had no assistance funds, so it could only provide some explosives for blasting mountains. The whole village dug with their hands and scraped with their feet, and it took a full 6 years and the sacrifice of 6 villagers to finally complete a 7.3 km mountain road.
In the vast rural areas of Chongqing, many villagers yearn for roads as strongly as the people of Xiazhuang. In order to get villagers onto roads and achieve coordinated urban-rural development, Chongqing began increasing investment in 2013 to strengthen rural road network construction. For a time, a wave of road construction was set off in many remote areas.
"The municipal party committee and municipal government attach great importance to rural transportation development, and for 4 consecutive years have included rural road construction in the 'practical livelihood matters' promised to the people of the whole city, and treated it as an important project for poverty alleviation. At the same time, with the support of the Ministry of Transport, this has provided us with fundamental momentum and a powerful lever to accelerate rural transportation development," said Qiao Dun, director of the Chongqing Municipal Communications Commission.
To advance rural road construction, the Chongqing Municipal Communications Commission also specially established a construction supervision group to conduct inspections by district and county and by month, and to promptly report construction progress to the whole city, ensuring that rural transportation development policies are not distorted, do not deviate, and are not discounted.
Since 2013, Chongqing has invested a total of 40 billion yuan in road construction and implemented the merged-village access project. In addition, Chongqing also strongly subsidizes rural passenger transport, and the rate of administrative villages with access to buses, where conditions permit, has reached 100%.
Lucid waters and lush mountains transformed into mountains of gold and silver
Chengkou is the most remote and poorest district and county in Chongqing. It is rich in green resources, but they were all locked in deep mountains and ravines and could not generate economic benefits. Now, with improved roads, the area has leveraged its ecological conditions to develop rural tourism and build the "Forest Family" brand, turning lucid waters and lush mountains into mountains of gold and silver.
Yang Shihui is the hostess of "Jinyan Dabashan Forest Family" in Xinglong Village, Dong'an Town, Chengkou County. In the past, because transportation was inconvenient, she and her husband worked away from home year-round, but even so they could not save much money by the end of the year. After the village road was built, she returned to the village to open a farmstay, with an annual income of more than 300,000 yuan, completely escaping poverty.
"Before transportation improved, villagers lived off the mountains, and many trees were cut down, causing damage to the environment. After tourism developed, lucid waters and lush mountains became mountains of gold and silver. Not only did everyone stop cutting trees, they also vigorously planted trees. Now the town's forest coverage rate has reached more than 96%, and living off the mountains has taken on a new meaning," said Li Zhangping, party secretary of Dong'an Town.
The changes in Chengkou are only a microcosm of Chongqing's efforts to tap ecological benefits through improved transportation. Such changes are even more fully reflected in some resource-exhausted cities. Chongqing's Wansheng is a national resource-exhausted city, and finding replacement industries and driving the people out of poverty toward prosperity was once a major headache for the local area. In recent years, by improving transportation, upgrading supporting facilities, and developing tourism, the area has gradually completed its momentum shift.
Liangfeng Village in Wansheng has beautiful scenery, but is remotely located. In the past there was only a 4 m wide tractor road, and villagers who went out to work were unwilling to return home. Not long ago, an 8 m wide asphalt road passed through the village, instantly injecting boundless vitality into Liangfeng Village. Tourists came in an endless stream, and villagers who had worked elsewhere returned home one after another to start businesses, gradually embarking on the road out of poverty toward prosperity.
Roads have given rural areas a new "way of thinking"
Reporters learned from interviews in many places in Chongqing that roads have brought rural areas not only wealth, but also a change in ideas and a transformation in the way things are organized.
After the roads in Liangfeng Village were built, villagers relied on the beautiful scenery to develop the tourism industry. This not only changed their previous production and lifestyle of going out to work, but also made them cherish every plant and tree in the village even more, making the village appearance cleaner and tidier. The village also integrated scattered fish ponds and established a specialized cooperative with villagers holding shares, developing the fishery economy and letting villagers taste the benefits of working together for development.
With the development of large-scale agriculture, cooperatives, enterprises, and other economic organizations have grown rapidly in rural areas, also giving the government more "levers" for poverty alleviation work. Some districts and counties have explored converting fiscal subsidy funds into shares, changing from directly distributing them to enterprises or cooperatives to distributing them to villagers, who then invest them as shares in cooperatives or enterprises to receive dividends. While improving the efficiency of fiscal subsidy funds, this has also solved the problem of helping villagers achieve prosperity permanently.
In addition, after full coverage of the rural road network was achieved, the internet and the road network became closely integrated, opening up a new dimension for agricultural product sales. In remote districts and counties such as Chengkou and Yunyang in southeastern and northeastern Chongqing, platforms such as "online villages" and "online e-commerce" are playing an increasingly important bridging role, building an unobstructed rapid channel between the supply and demand of agricultural products.