Remote mountainous area in Pingxiang, Guangxi sees booming border trade, migrant workers return home to help fight poverty

In Pingxiang, a border city in Guangxi on the China-Vietnam border long known as China's overland "southern gateway," targeted poverty alleviation through border trade has transformed many impoverished border residents into increasingly busy "border traders," who are now enjoying the "real benefits" of border trade under the country's preferential policies.

Men and women of all ages from border villages, wearing sun hats, line up in long queues in the summer heat outside the customs inspection hall, chatting while waiting to declare their transactions. Once declarations and inspections are cleared, a stream of cargo vans files out of the parking lot, carrying large quantities of cassava, nuts, herbal medicines and other products from Vietnam and other ASEAN countries on journeys to destinations across the country.

This was the scene a reporter witnessed recently at the Puzhai mutual trade point in Youyi Town, Pingxiang. "Each person has a quota of 8,000 yuan per day, and within that quota it's tax-free. Now five or six hundred people from our village come here regularly to buy goods and do a bit of business, and they earn income once they deliver the goods," said Ma Xuejin, a border resident of Kafeng Village in Youyi Town, Pingxiang.

In fact, Ma Xuejin only became involved in mutual trade in recent years. Pingxiang, located in the southern frontier of the motherland, borders Lang Son Province in Vietnam and has a 97-kilometer border line. It is China's largest and most convenient overland port and corridor to ASEAN countries, but for a long time, owing to natural conditions, poor transportation and historical factors, the border areas have had a relatively large poor population.

Speaking of the past, Ma Xuejin shook her head repeatedly and said it was "too hard." Kafeng Village sits right against the border, almost entirely surrounded by towering mountains and steep ridges, where "the land cannot support the people." Finding work locally was not easy, and young people left home one after another to work elsewhere.

"The village has more than 2,300 people in total. At the peak, eight or nine out of ten young people had left, and the village was deserted. After border trade developed in recent years, fewer than 10 percent of young people go out to work, and more and more people have returned to this 'remote mountain nook,'" said Huang Jiqiang, director of the Kafeng Village Committee.

To promote border prosperity and enrich the people, the state introduced the mutual trade policy, first raising the tax-free import quota for border residents' mutual trade from 3,000 yuan to 8,000 yuan, and in 2010 adjusting the list of import and export commodities not eligible for tax exemption under border residents' mutual trade, making mutual trade increasingly vibrant.

Qiu Minghong, secretary of the Pingxiang Municipal Party Committee, said that from the beginning of this year to the end of 2017, Pingxiang plans to lift 12,000 people out of poverty and remove all 10 poor villages from the poverty list, and vigorously developing border residents' mutual trade is precisely a path of targeted poverty alleviation the locality is exploring. Pingxiang has already established several border trade cooperatives, including Hairun and Jinsuiyuan, with more than 6,000 border residents participating in mutual trade every day.

The Hairun Border Trade Professional Cooperative is one of the local pilot cooperatives. Since its establishment in March 2014, its annual transaction volume has exceeded 300 million yuan. Huang Kequan, a supervisor of the cooperative, said the cooperative provides members with full services from loans to transaction settlement. Border resident members who take part in mutual trade can receive a subsidy of about 30 yuan per person per day; members with vehicles earn 100 to 200 yuan a day in transport fees; and at the end of the year the cooperative also distributes 60 percent of total profits as dividends to members.

Compared with the past, such cooperatives allow border residents to truly participate in the mutual trade process and put real benefits into their pockets. "At present, cooperative membership has grown from 25 people at the start to more than 1,600, including about 690 members from poor households, accounting for more than 40 percent," Huang Kequan said.

Huang Zeyu, a 78-year-old resident of Guan'ai Tun in Kafeng Village, has already lost both sons and lives alone with her granddaughter, scraping by with a barbering stall, but as she grows older she has fallen into difficulty. After receiving assistance and joining a border trade cooperative, the elderly woman is expected to earn more than 10,000 yuan this year and can be lifted out of poverty by the end of the year.

"We are accelerating the improvement of specialized markets and advancing the construction of trade processing parks, raising the added value of products by extending the industrial chain," said Huang Bo, deputy director of the Pingxiang Municipal Bureau of Commerce. At present, some enterprises have already begun production in the Youyiguan Industrial Park, which mainly processes mutual trade products, and in the future a concentrated trade processing industrial zone will take shape from the Pingxiang Youyiguan Industrial Park to Ningming County town.

Statistics from Pingxiang show that from January to June this year, the city's total mutual trade import and export value reached 910 million US dollars, up 11.79 percent year on year. Against the backdrop of a still severe national foreign trade situation, Pingxiang's border mutual trade has grown against the trend and shown strong momentum under the support of favorable national policies.