Qinghai steps up efforts to reduce poverty, protect environment

Scenery of the Qinghai Lake, China's largest inland saltwater lake, in northwest China's Qinghai province. [Photo: IC]

In 2016, President Xi Jinping joined the Qinghai delegation at the Two Sessions in Beijing – the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference – to call upon local officials to push forward a plan for environment protection, poverty alleviation, and development in minority areas. The result of this push has been substantial progress in the province's development.

A local village called Dashijia is one example of the plan's success. Many new enterprises have been established in the village, including farmhouses that have been converted into accommodation for tourists, which generates additional income for the villagers.

"My family's annual average income has reached 13,600 yuan (around 2,028 U.S. dollars), and it is higher if you include the income from my work at the factory." said Duojie Nanjie, a villager from Dashijia Village.

The isolated location of the village on the plateau makes it hard for the local people to find ways to generate enough of an income to rise out of poverty. But targeted poverty alleviation policies, including work to foster new industries, have had positive outcomes. Over the past three years, the provincial government has helped 443,000 people to step out poverty, and the poverty rate dropped from 13.2 percent at the end of 2015 to just 2.5 percent at the end of last year.

Officials with the provincial government say that they will continue in their struggle to reduce poverty in the region. They plan to target entrenched poverty in the 17 most economically-disadvantaged counties in 2019.

The other area of focus for officials in Qinghai is environmental protection. The Sanjiangyuan area is the birthplace of the Yangtze River, Yellow River, and Lancang River. At the meeting in Beijing in March 2016, President Xi stressed that Qinghai should initiate a pilot project to develop a national park there. By the end of the following month, the Qinghai government established a leading group for the project and released its first plans for park.

The amount of the green land in the park region has reached 70 percent, and industries that pose a risk to the environment, such as mining and tourism, have been curtailed by the local government. And the province has turned to technology to aid them in their work, creating a database of environmental indicators so they can more accurately monitor the region's ecology.