Rail link a dream come true for family who fled poverty
Print Edition
WHEN the first railway in the mountains of Dangchang County in northwest China’s Gansu Province opened yesterday, Yang Ganu was there to witness a 20-year-old dream come true.
She had traveled more than 2,700 kilometers from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to her hometown, accompanied by her youngest daughter Li Youxia, 20.
Yang had left in 1996 to move to Xinjiang with her husband and two daughters, driven to leave extreme poverty in one of China’s least developed areas.
Twenty years ago, her hometown in the hinterland of Longnan City was surrounded by rocky mountains and had little arable land. Villagers had to hike long distances to find fertile soil to grow anything.
A photograph taken in 1996 shows Yang and her baby daughter sitting in their family’s dirt hut. On the wall behind them, her husband had drawn, with charcoal, a train zigzagging through the mountains.
“We were having the hardest time in those days. We never had enough to feed the entire family of four,” said Yang, who used to beg for food in neighboring counties, carrying one of her daughters on her back. “We longed to take a train to a richer place where we could make money more easily.”
Later that year, the family hiked out of the mountains and traveled northwest to Xinjiang, a place they heard had rich natural resources and fertile land.
Life in Xinjiang is much better. Yang’s husband works as a cleaner in the regional capital Urumqi, and Yang has settled down with the children in the Mongolian autonomous prefecture of Bortala, where she harvests cotton every summer.
The older daughter is married and has a baby; her sister works as a hotel cashier.
“It is amazing that our remote hometown has got access to trains,” said Yang, who is visiting her home county at the local government’s invitation.
The new route is part of an 855-kilometer railway linking Lanzhou, capital of Gansu Province, with Chongqing in China’s southwest. The entire route will be open by the end of next year.
Yang’s daughter, Li, said the hometown is completely different to the one her parents told her about.
“They said every family lived in shabby huts and never had enough to eat, but I saw all new houses and the people living a decent life,” Li said.
About 910,000 people in Longnan have been lifted from poverty over the past five years. Meanwhile, the poverty rate there has dropped from 53 percent to 16 percent, according to local government figures.
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