China moved millions to fight poverty, how are they now?

In 2013, when Liu Li, her husband and two young children boarded a bus with all their belongings to move to a new home built by the government some 350 kilometers away, tears filled her eyes. 

Even though life in her village of Longde in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region was never prosperous, for Liu and generations before her, the barren mountains were all they had ever known. Leaving them behind for an uncertain future brought a kind of sadness Liu had never felt before.

Thirteen years later, when CGTN met Liu in the wine cellar where she now works as a manager in her new hometown of Minning, she looked back on her old life almost in disbelief.

"It would have been a mess," Liu said. "My children would have dropped out of school and would have been doing odd jobs now."

Instead, her daughter graduated from college and now works at the same winery, while her son is studying medicine at university.

Liu is one example, albeit an exceptionally successful one, of the more than 10 million Chinese who relocated under government poverty alleviation programs under China's 12th and 13th Five-Year Plans (2011–2020).

When China declared a "complete victory" over absolute poverty in 2021, relocation was described as the campaign's "most difficult and costly" measure, compared with programs that supported residents in their original homes through subsidies and investment.

Five years after the last wave of relocations was completed, how are those communities doing today?

New home, new possibilities

Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region was one of the earliest regions in China to organize large-scale government-led resettlement, dating back to the early 1980s.

The earliest migrants faced the harshest conditions, often having to build their own houses after arriving at newly established settlements on the edge of the desert. As China's economy grew, so did the government's ability to support later generations of migrants with better housing and infrastructure.

When Liu moved to Minning in 2013 as part of Ningxia's ecological migration program, a house with running water, electricity and internet access was already waiting for her family. At the time, those amenities were still not universal in rural China.

But Liu's greatest stroke of luck may have been her timing. She arrived just as Ningxia's wine industry, decades in the making, was beginning to take off.

In the sandy fields just outside her village, an entrepreneur from Inner Mongolia had recently invested in a new vineyard. Liu landed a job there as a cleaner and eventually worked her way up to become the certified winemaker she is today.

These days, she drives her SUV to the winery, while her husband heads to the company's vineyards in a sedan. They return home for lunch and dinner, often joined by their daughter, who also works for the company.

Of course, not every migrating family's transformation is as stunning as Liu's leap from potato farmer to winemaker. She is indeed something of a poster figure for the relocation campaign. But many other women CGTN interviewed also experienced transformations brought by the move.

Whether working as seasonal laborers in the vineyards or running food stalls at the local market, many said they had far more opportunities to earn their own income than they ever did in their mountain villages, where subsistence farming had long been their only option. Having their own money, they said, gave them a greater sense of independence that extended beyond the materialistic benefits.

Creating jobs remains a priority of the relocation programs. Outside investment has often played a crucial role, with more affluent eastern provinces paired with less developed inland regions under the country's East-West cooperation program. In Ningxia, for example, companies from its partner province of Fujian have established garment factories that employ many relocated residents.

According to China's top economic planner, more than 94% of relocated residents with labor capacity were employed by the end of 2022.

For Liu, however, her children's education has been the most meaningful outcome of the move. Back in Longde, they walked several miles through the mountains to school each day. The physical exhaustion, she said, robbed her kids of the education she had always wished for herself.

In Minning, schools were built inside the new communities, and the journey became much shorter. It was still not easy, Liu said, but at least her children had a chance, she managed to push both of them to university.

Old homes, returned to nature

Liu's hometown of Longde County is located in Xihaigu, a region that had become synonymous with extreme poverty due to decades of drought and hardship.

With that image in mind, CGTN traveled there, only to find little traces of its former reputation.

During the five-hour drive from Minning to Guyuan, endless rows of solar panels lined the highway in the desert. In the cities and townships, hotels and restaurants were more upscale than those in Minning. An hour further out, we reached the villages where many migrants once lived. Barricades now stand at the village entrances to protect forests from fire hazards. Most of the houses are gone; in their place are rows of saplings.

The plants represent the other half of the migration story — restoring ecology.

According to authorities, the land in Xihaigu could support about 22 people per square kilometer — yet at one point, population density reached 142. Officials realized that any aid would only be a band-aid and would place further stress on a land that could not support growth. The only way to achieve sustainable development was to relocate residents and let the land recover.

After decades of effort, local official Ma Wensi told CGTN, the results are already becoming visible, with increased rainfall in recent years. The region is now promoting tourism, highlighting its national parks and Silk Road heritage sites.

High in the mountains, women in headscarves can be seen tilling the land to plant vegetation. And what they are doing here is meant to last.