Xuan Yan, left, checks whether a villager is receiving social security support. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Xuan Yan visits an elderly villager in Jiangkou village in Zhaoping county, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Xuan Yan walks a trail in the hills where the villagers grow tea. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

China National Aviation's poverty relief partnership with Zhaoping county has helped ensure no one in Jiangkou village has been left behind

"Can you imagine that I was once a skycap?" Xuan Yan said with a smile. Xuan, 49, as a grassroots official responsible for poverty alleviation, has served as the Party secretary of Jiangkou village in Zhaoping county, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, since July 2018.

Before that, he was in Beijing, working as a deputy senior manager for global luggage services of China National Aviation Holding Corporation's ground service department.

During the past two years, Xuan, who looks tanned, witnessed at the grassroots level China's complete victory in eradicating absolute poverty, which was announced by President Xi Jinping in February this year.

"It was such a great happiness to serve the villagers and help them get out of poverty," said Xuan. "What I have learned here during the past two years outweighs those in the last two decades," he added.

Xuan is the third employee of China National Aviation who worked as Party secretary of Jiangkou since the company established in 2013 a poverty relief partnership with Zhaoping county, part of the country's targeted poverty alleviation strategy.

The efforts of Xuan and his predecessors have borne fruits. In 2019, the village's cooperatives generated a revenue of 450,000 yuan ($68,850), compared with 300,000 yuan in 2018. As of the end of September last year, the businesses' revenue for 2020 already exceeded 500,000 yuan.

Zhaoping, which used to have 72 poverty-stricken villages and an impoverished population of nearly 70,000, managed to eradicate absolute poverty in May 2020, according to the county's government work report last year.

Xuan, an aviation company executive who worked in Beijing and had limited knowledge about the country's poverty alleviation measures for rural areas before he was appointed as Party secretary of Jiangkou, said the measures highlighted the Party's "people-centered" philosophy and its commitment to the decades-long poverty reduction campaign.

With Xuan's efforts, the village launched several cooperatives featuring the tea industry, tourism, mushroom cultivation and mulberry plantation and built a kindergarten, which significantly increased local residents' incomes.

China National Aviation has also invested more than 1 million yuan in helping the village build a new bridge to replace a dilapidated one, which helped addressed safety concerns and enabled villagers to sell more specialty products to the outside world.

Xuan has also visited all 363 impoverished families in Jiangkou, a 33-square-kilometer mountainous village, to learn if they had benefited from the preferential poverty-relief policies and make sure they had received government subsidies for the rural poor and had access to the national medical insurance network for rural residents.

Although Xuan's two-year tenure was scheduled to end in July last year, he said he has decided to stay for another six months so that the village's poverty-relief achievements are consolidated and the risks of villagers falling back to poverty are properly addressed.

"I have to admit that the working and living conditions here are very rough, but I feel so fulfilled working on something that matters to my fellow villagers," he said.