Opportunities and Challenges in the Birthplace of “Targeted Poverty Alleviation”: Observations from Shibadong Village in Hunan Province
摘要
Shibadong Village in Huayuan County, Hunan Province, is the birthplace to initiate the “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” in China, when Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee and President of the People's Republic of China, visited Shibadong Village on November 13, 2013, and made the important remarks on “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” for the first time. Henceforth it opened the new chapter of nationwide poverty alleviation and development. In order to implement the instruction spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping's visit to Shibadong Village, CPC Party Committee as well as the people’s government of Huayuan County took Shibadong Village as a pilot village to explore the replicable and promotable experience of targeted poverty alleviation in the county. And it also creatively explored and yielded positive results in resident work and industrial alleviation mechanism. In this paper, we discuss the three major development opportunities for Shibadong Village as the birthplace of “targeted poverty alleviation”, and the risks and challenges encountered in the rapid transformation and development of industries, from the perspective of development opportunities and realistic challenges. We argue that the visit of the General Secretary Xi to Shibadong Village and the continuous and extensive coverage of Shibadong Village by the Central Media of the Central Government of the People's Republic of China in support of the national poverty elimination campaign have provided very critical and rare external opportunities for the development of Shibadong Village. In the process of rapid transformation from traditional farming and breeding industries to the modern manufacturing and tourism service industries, the more and more pressing problems such as the bottleneck problem of the collective economy of Shibadong Village, the lack of private capital, and the negative impact on traditional industries caused by policy changes are posing real challenges to the independent and sustainable development of the village, which cannot be ignored.