Veteran's front-line battle to save a village

For more than two months, retired major general Liu Jianxin has slept on a makeshift bed of eight chairs in a village committee room in Hong'an county, Hubei province.

The 64-year-old army veteran rushed back to Wangjiachong village from Beijing on Jan 23, just as the province's capital, Wuhan, was being locked down to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. Liu has stayed in the village for more than 70 days helping control the epidemic and working with local farmers on poverty alleviation projects.

He is the chairman of the Hubei Foundation for Poverty Alleviation and the former deputy political commissar of the People's Liberation Army's Hubei Military Region.

In 2017, as a member of the Standing Committee of the provincial People's Congress, Liu was assigned a poor village and given the task of helping lift it out of poverty. He retired from the congress before the 2018 election, but his connection with Wangjiachong village has continued. He visited the village 32 times in 2018 and 31 times last year to conduct poverty alleviation work.

Last year, Liu spent the first seven days of the Spring Festival holiday with villagers. They had dinner together, watched the New Year's Eve gala and lit firecrackers during the countdown to the new year. "We had a very good time, so this year I was going to do the same thing," he said.

On Jan 23, Liu set off from Beijing to Hong'an in the morning, learning about the Wuhan lockdown on the way. "At that time, I didn't expect things could become so serious because I didn't have a good sense of the situation when I was in Beijing," he said.

"The villagers tried to persuaded me not to come, but I wanted to see how things had developed there."

Liu told himself that there was nothing to be afraid of. "I told them I would be there to support them and together we could get this done."

In the field

After Liu arrived, he organized the village committee to lock down all five entrances to the village to control and register every entry and exit. All householders were asked to isolate themselves at home and regularly monitor their health. This especially applied to 236 migrant workers who had returned from Wuhan for the holidays.

"At first many people didn't take the epidemic too seriously," Liu said. "They felt Wuhan was far away and the countryside was much less populated. So some would gather to play poker or mahjong."

To prevent such gatherings, Liu and village committee staff members patrolled the streets every day going from door to door to warn of the dangers of gatherings.

Into February, the weather began getting warmer and some farmers sneaked into the fields to tend their crops. Village officials sounded a loud horn to warn them to go back inside. "We stayed on alert every moment," Liu said.

Because of this vigilance, the village remained free from infection and Hong'an was one of the first areas designated by the provincial government as "low risk".

Farmers resumed production on March 12, and three days later road blockades were removed so migrant workers could return to work. Liu chose to stay on in the village to help with the spring planting and also push on with poverty alleviation projects.

When he first arrived in the village in March 2017, he learned its collective income was only 1,200 yuan the previous year. In 2017, the village crossed the poverty threshold of 50,000 yuan by developing cattle cooperatives and some small projects.

Liu has continued his efforts to improve the villagers' livelihoods. Before Chinese New Year, he raised 400,000 yuan ($56,500) for poverty alleviation. He also scoured almost every inch of land in and around the village and devised ways to generate income from unused areas.

He eventually marked out six hillside slopes to develop agricultural projects, with one already prepared for chrysanthemum cultivation.

Liu said the village has grown pears, mushrooms, sweet potatoes and developed beekeeping, all of which reaped 110,000 yuan in income last year. "Depending on which industry is going well, we will enlarge the scale of it to formulate our brand," he said.