Villagers moving out of arid areas
Print Edition
VILLAGE elder Yang Zhenjun isn’t ready to move out from the valley where his people have herded sheep and tended crops for generations amid arid, drought-prone mountains of China’s northwest. Still, he acknowledges that life as he has known it is all but over.
The community’s 60 families have dwindled down to 11 in recent years. Others have left this area, which is almost completely dependent on often-scarce rainfall, and have headed north to plains with better infrastructure and more accessible water.
“The village has completely died,” says Yang Zhenjun, a fifth-generation resident of Dacha Village in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region’s Xiji County. Still, he is not eager to move. “I was born in this village. I grew up in this village. Everyone struggles with these same feelings.”
Most former villagers of Dacha have moved under a government plan to relocate 350,000 people to lift them out of grinding poverty which, for their region, has been worsened by an increase in average temperatures of 2.2 degrees Celsius over the past half-century that leaves the land more parched.
Many of Dacha’s houses are empty and overgrown with plants and trees; walls and roofs have crumbled. As people leave, schools and other facilities in villages like Dacha are forced to shutter, making life tougher for those left behind.
Many who have moved in Ningxia are for the most part content with the result.
Hai Yanhu, 71, who moved in July 2012 from Panwan Village in Xiji County to a resettlement project in Pingluo County in the north, said he is happy to now have running water and a shower. He barely thinks anymore of his old village, where going long distances to fetch water was a daily task.
“We would have to go down into the valley, and carry the water with a pail on our backs. We would go every day, but if there was something special happening at home then we would have to go four or five times a day,” Hai said.
Wang Ziyi, 52, said he moved to Pingluo in December 2014 from Huoshizhai in Xiji County.
Wang said he misses his old town but that the “economy here is better than the economy in the mountains of Xiji. It’s more convenient. Here, it’s a bit easier to find manual labor jobs.”
Zou Yuzhong, deputy director of Ningxia Poverty Reduction Bureau, says the government is moving people out of “inhospitable” climates to “help put them on the path to success.”
Ma Bingfu, 52, who moved to Pingluo from Taobao Village in Xiji County in October 2011, said the young adjust better than older people.
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