Tourism bringing a brighter future to poor province
Print Edition
AFTER years of traveling in the mountains of Guizhou Province in southwest China doing odd jobs, Xie Jincheng has returned home to Yaoshan Township for a job in its fledgling tourism industry.
“I’ll settle down for a couple of years to see how things go,” Xie, a member of the Yao ethnic minority, said.
He works as a tourist guide at a Yao-style tourist spot in Yaoshan, now a community accommodating migrants from poor villages.
Xie had to leave home to find work. Now, he is thrilled to find a job in his hometown.
Just three years ago, more than 300 rural Yao households struggled to feed themselves in Yaoshan.
Xie’s family is among hundreds resettled into the new urban community.
The settlers not only got new houses and social security benefits, but also jobs in tourism. The local government set aside funds for them to participate in Yao song and dance performances, ethnic handicrafts, and serving ethnic food to boost tourism.
The practice in Yaoshan is deemed a practical solution for Guizhou, once considered one of the country’s poorest areas, as it pushes forward a massive project to move 1 million ethnic minority people, along with 1 million Han, from harsh environments to urban settlements by 2020.
However, employment remains a hard nut to crack since the people who traditionally live through farming and hunting lack job skills.
A government conference on ethnic affairs in late September called for efforts to ensure “leapfrog development” in ethnic regions, where many still live in poverty, via utilization of their “distinctive advantages.”
Wang Yingzheng, who heads Guizhou’s migration project, said planners will copy the success of Yaoshan and build more settlements whose pillar industry is ethnic culture tourism.
But while young people long for the city life, many of the older generation resist the change. Living in the new settlement in Yaoshan, 24-year-old Xie Changmei, a member of a local troupe, and her chef husband make about 6,000 yuan a month (about US$980). However, her husband’s parents stay in their wooden house in the mountain, feeling out of place in town.
For many ethnic minority migrants, houses and jobs are not enough to lead a new life. Peng Qian, a professor of ethnology at the Minzu University of China, said the migrants’ religious traditions had to be respected.
Ma Hongliang, 52, is eagerly awaiting a mosque in the new community he moved to last year. He used to live about 500 kilometers away in Xihaigu, a region declared “uninhabitable” by United Nations experts.
In 2012, northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, heavily populated by the Muslim Hui ethnic minority, launched a project to relocate 350,000 residents from Xihaigu to new neighborhoods closer to town. Ma is among nearly 230,000 who have moved.
Hui migrants get along well with their Han neighbors in their new communities.
Praying five times a day by the Hui, summoned by a large loudspeaker, might have been annoying for the Han, but none of the latter has ever complained.
Likewise, the Hui tolerate the Han’s custom of setting off noisy firecrackers during Chinese Lunar New Year.
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