In this undated file photo, hostesses promote chrysanthemum tea via livestreaming from Yantouwan village, Macheng, Hubei province. (CHEN JIA / CHINA DAIL)
In Northwest China's Shaanxi province, famous for its rich coal resources, Miaowan, a township in Tongchuan city, is now better known as "Shiitake Mushroom Town" because the edible fungus business has transformed lives and society.
Such transformations are not limited to people. Even landscapes in the province are witness to enormous change. Where dust and exposed mines were a common sight, green mountains and verdant valleys are ubiquitous today in warmer days.
Wang Mingmei, a Miaowan farmer, epitomizes the ongoing change. Three years back, she was mired in poverty. Today, however, she does not mind light rain and appears enthusiastic and content while arranging shiitake mushrooms in neat stacks of rows at a greenhouse.
More than 500 such greenhouses dot the hillside that, not very long ago, was home to coal mines. Such has been the momentum of China's rural revitalization program that change is visible and inescapable in every nook and cranny of this region.
Where the national poverty alleviation program ended successfully, rural revitalization began in right earnest, bringing not just smiles and energy to people such as Wang but real prosperity and purpose to life.
Today, Wang's job of picking mushrooms brings her an annual income of about 40,000 yuan (US$6,259).
That rural economic magic has been made possible by a modern agricultural technology demonstration base built in Miaowan three years ago.
When a group of reporters toured the mountainous, river-rich region, they got to witness scenes vastly different from history book images. Supported by the local government, ecological farming, which reduces impact of man on nature, has become a key industry here.
ALSO READ: Rural e-commerce lifts farming sector
Wang said she is aware ecological farming is a better alternative as it protects soil, water and climate, promotes biodiversity, and does not contaminate the environment with chemical inputs.
She has Sun Xiaoshan, a local coal mine owner, to thank for such knowledge. About three years ago, Sun found that some households in a neighboring town called Liulin started planting shiitake mushrooms. They bought breeding sticks for edible fungus and grew shiitake mushrooms at home. The high-frequency harvests brought higher incomes to farmers who hitherto planted grain in the mountains.
In this undated file photo, Wang Mingmei, a farmer in Miaowan township in Northwest China's Shaanxi province, gathers shiitake mushrooms at a greenhouse. (CHEN JIA / CHINA DAILY)
So, Sun started up with Tongchuan Dexiang Industrial Co Ltd in September 2017 by investing more than 70 million yuan, after receiving 40 million yuan from a government-run fund. Over the last three years, the startup, which employs Wang among others, set up bases to grow shiitake mushrooms in Miaowan. The startup's annual income is now nearly 2.4 million yuan.
"I plan to build a new base to grow edible fungus this year and expand an existing one," said Sun, who is now targeting 200 million yuan in total revenue this year.
The fiscal spending will remain stable to consolidate the poverty alleviation achievements and support the rural revitalization plan, which will give priority to the development of special industries having competitive advantages in underdeveloped areas, said Li Minghuai, deputy director-general of the finance department of Shaanxi province
The government fund that financed Tongchuan Dexiang was set up for "rural revitalization", China's follow-up goal to an eight-year poverty alleviation campaign that helped eradicate absolute poverty and overall regional poverty in 2020. The rural revitalization strategy was announced by the country's leadership in 2017.
ALSO READ: Li encourages revitalization of Northeast
Local authorities in Shaanxi province have dispatched special work teams to implement the rural development plan. The Ministry of Finance announced the establishment of a special leading group and an office in the name of rural revitalization on May 12, to ensure that supportive funds can be delivered to thousands of villages in a timely manner.
In 2021, the central and provincial governments arranged subsidies of 10.86 billion yuan in annual fiscal budgets to promote the rural revitalization strategy, up by 3.58 percent from a year earlier, according to Li Minghuai, deputy director-general of the finance department of Shaanxi province.
The fiscal spending will remain stable to consolidate the poverty alleviation achievements and support the rural revitalization plan, which will give priority to the development of special industries having competitive advantages in underdeveloped areas, Li said.
From 2016 to 2020, the accumulated amount of special fiscal funds injected in poverty alleviation projects stood at 61.32 billion yuan in Shaanxi. The efforts mainly supported 56 poor counties to develop industries and facilitated investments in infrastructure construction, a local finance official said. "The idea is to ensure that the investment remains stable and constant."
The central government plans to allocate 156.1 billion yuan to the so-called rural revitalization assistance fund this year, which was formerly called the special poverty alleviation fund. If that comes to pass, the allocation will have increased by 10 billion yuan, or 7 percent, from the figure a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Finance.
The total expenditure in the national general public budget is projected to be over 25 trillion yuan this year, up 1.8 percent year-on-year, the ministry indicated in the annual budgetary report in March.
In this undated file photo, farmers process walnuts to make cushions in Miaowan township of Tongchuan, Shaanxi province. Processing units are set up in communities to help farmers find jobs near their homes. (LIU XIAO / XINHUA)
The fiscal funds, which will be used to consolidate and expand progress in poverty alleviation with rural revitalization, will focus on the areas that are less developed and have heavy tasks in achieving the goals, the ministry said on May 21.
Of the total spend, 239.45 billion yuan is for supporting high-quality agricultural development and to increase income of farmers, it said.
China's authorities have identified a five-year period, starting from 2021, as a transition between the two drives－from poverty alleviation to rural revitalization. And during the period, the government will continually spend huge money to promote industries with competitive advantages in underdeveloped regions, planning to increase the spending year by year.
With financial support from the local government, Shiitake Mushroom Town (Miaowan, a township in Tongchuan city, Shaanxi province) will see an expansion of bases this year. More villagers can rent the greenhouses in Miaowan and its neighborhood and invest in the emerging business niche
Experts said some anti-poverty plans, although they have finished, will need additional funds to consolidate the results, such as driving urbanization through resettlement, providing job opportunities to poor people, improving living environment in villages and constructing public infrastructure.
The country's financial policies will take effect to prevent people from falling back into poverty, which needs a special arrangement as part of the budgetary spending of about 2.2 billion yuan, according to the finance ministry.
"In the first three years of the transitional period, counties that have recently been lifted out of poverty will be allowed to integrate and coordinate the use of government funds for rural development," said the nation's annual budget report, adding that policies will support the growth of village collective economies and strengthen funding safeguards for the operations of village-level organizations.
In the first quarter, the 18.3 percent year-on-year growth in China's GDP, which was above the pre-pandemic level, came on an unprecedentedly low statistical base due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Domestic consumption, however, has not yet gotten back on track. The government indicated that it intends to unleash domestic demand by facilitating the extension of e-commerce and delivery services to rural areas. That followed China's dual-circulation development pattern that takes the domestic market as the mainstay and appears to integrate itself with the rural revitalization goal, said analysts.
Towns with particular agricultural strengths and clusters of leading agro-industries with unique advantages are also on the list of policy supports, they said.
The Sun-founded startup has expanded production lines from making mushroom breeding sticks to processing byproducts, such as mushroom pastes and mushroom chips.
According to Yang Lei, head of Tongchuan city government's finance department, fiscal subsidies have been increased to support rural development and improve the system of commercial services for agriculture, which focuses on establishing a modern system of business operations in the agricultural sector.
Sun said: "Local villagers showed high interest and they are very keen to join the mushroom-growing projects. In such businesses, they can be their own boss. They can rent greenhouses, hire workers and share profits. My company offers the farmers advanced technology and consultancy services, and we control the quality of products."
The startup is exploring ways to promote sales of mushroom-related products. Online sales and exports of the breeding sticks are among the options being seriously considered. Sun has received orders for 300,000 sticks from South Korea and for 2 million sticks from the United States and Japan so far.
Wei Zhaofeng, Miaowan's government chief, said local authorities have integrated and coordinated the use of fiscal funds to build new bases to grow mushrooms. Their ownership belongs to village collectives that entrust management to private companies, and collect contract fees from individual business owners, said Wei.
With financial support from the local government, Shiitake Mushroom Town will see an expansion of bases this year. More villagers can rent the greenhouses in Miaowan and its neighborhood and invest in the emerging business niche. "This will be the leading business segment for local residents to increase their income," said Wei.
The edible fungus industry is labor-intensive but low planting threshold and quick returns are its advantages. Through them, it is easy to provide poor people with jobs and incomes. It is one form of work from home, she said.
"We are developing innovative methods to support the rural revitalization strategy, and wish to take advantage of fiscal actions at the grassroots level as that's the key. It requires improvements to county-level fiscal management," said Yang.
Last year, the city-level fiscal management expanded functions and involved agricultural credit financing guarantee and agriculture policy insurance to strengthen financial support for large-scale agriculture production.
The government's administrative groups at the county-level promoted local leading industries, and the top five counties by economic performance received rewards and subsidies of 3.5 million yuan from fiscal funds, according to Yang.
READ MORE: Village plays star role in rural revitalization
In 2020, Tongchuan city's 359 village collectives notched up 220 million yuan in operating revenue, with revenues of 16 of them exceeding 1 million yuan each, Yang said.
chenjia@chinadaily.com.cn