CRI听力:Political advisors dedicated to improving rural living environment

Officials from Guizhou Province who are in Beijing for the ongoing Two Sessions have said that the living conditions of the province's rural residents have greatly improved in recent years, and that more work will be done to build on the progress that has been made so far.

Yu Liufen is an official working in a remote village in a mountainous area in Guizhou Province. She said that the living standard of local residents has improved thanks to new roads leading into the village.

"We started the project to build a beautiful village four years ago. Now I'm proud to say that you can see cement roads leading into every village in Panzhou county."

Yu became an official at Yanbo Village in 2001. Back then, the village was blighted by poverty, and each villager only earned about 800 yuan a year.

Thanks to concerted government efforts to build new roads in the region and industrialize agricultural production, in 2018 the villagers each earned around 18-thousand yuan. Apart from economic growth, Yu also stressed the importance of improving the local environment, and said that local leaders had invested huge efforts into making the village more livable.

"Today, 80 percent of Yanbo village is covered by forest, there's a sea of flowers, and countless springs run through the mountains and plains. What's happened in Guizhou is not an accident. Local leaders took responsibility for it, and have been working really hard to achieve these goals," said Yu Liufen.

Zhou Jianmin is an official who has submitted a proposal on environmental governance. He said that many challenges remain when it comes to improving the environment of the country's vast rural areas.

"The system of ecological agriculture and green agriculture has not been fully established. The excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers has not been properly controlled."

China's government has vowed to reduce the number of people living in rural poverty by over 10 million in 2019. To achieve that, the central government plans to allocate over 120 billion yuan to fund poverty alleviation. China has set 2020 as its target to finish building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and to completely eradicate poverty.

Guizhou, a relatively poor province, is at the forefront of the country's campaign to eliminate poverty.

Official data shows that the province lifted 1.2 million people out of poverty in 2017.