Female Village Official Leads Villagers to Prosperity in N China

Li Shengqin, a female village official in northwest China's Shaanxi Province has helped her fellow villagers get rid of poverty by growing apples.

Li is the party branch secretary in the village of Tumen, a village in Zhidan County, Shaanxi.

She was born in a poverty-stricken family and lived in a miserable life before her marriage.

In order to settle in the village, she married a man who had just lost his wife in 1986. They have worked together to fight for a better life since.

She started to raise goats in 1992. It pleased Li and her husband to see that the18 goats she bought grew to 35 in number only the next year, and became more than 50 the year after.

As the number of goats increased, their life became better year by year.

During the goat-raising process, she found that selling goats for others could also earn quite a handsome sum of money if she herded goats from village to village for sale, rather than using a vehicle, in which case she needed to pay the hired hands.

A trip would take about 12 or 13 days, during which time she would sleep with the goats outdoors. And she kept on selling goats like this for as long as 16 years.

Li concentrated on making a fortune on goat raising and selling, and built a sheepfold at home. The number of goats in her sheepfold once reached as many as 100.

The central government has started to issue the No.1 document on "agriculture, rural areas and rural residents" every year since 2004, and accordingly, investment on infrastructure construction and social construction have been greatly increased in rural areas .

Li family already became a well-off household in Yongning Town at the time.

As a basic national policy, gender equality was enshrined in the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Protection of Women's Rights and Interests in 2005.

In order to respond to the call of nation, it was required that at least one of the two official positions in the village committee and village party branch should be held by a woman.

Li was thus elected by the villagers as the village director, head of the village committee.

She was then elected as a deputy of the county-level people's congress in 2006.

The more conferences she participated in, the more confident she became in leading villagers to get rid of poverty.

As apples have became a key industry in Yan'an, a city of Shaanxi Province, to develop modern agriculture and the rural economy, and increase farmers' income after trial, she started to persuade villagers to plant apple trees. It was not until she had gone through many difficulties and setbacks that the villagers began to give their nod to her proposal.

Under her leadership, villagers started to plant apple trees, which soon took up a cultivated area of nearly 1,335 mu (89 hectares) that year.

Thanks to the apple-growing industry, the per capita income of the villagers increased from 2,400 yuan in 2005 to 9,600 yuan in 2017. The 13 registered poverty-stricken households will shake off poverty this year, according to Li.

Nowadays, the apple planting area in the village has increased to 1,776 mu (118.4 hectares).

Villagers’ living standards have increased a lot thanks to the reform and opening up policy, as well as Li’s leadership.

Li was elected as the deputy of Yan'an municipal people's congress in 2017 and was recommended and elected as party branch secretary of the village in March 2018.

"It gratifies me to see that fellow villagers lead better lives now, and that the economy of the village is revitalizing. I shall continue to work hard to narrow their living standards with that of their urban counterparts in the future," she said.

(Source: paper.fnews.cc/ Translated and edited by Women of China )