Businesses help shake off poverty

Workers at Song Ruisen's dried tofu factory in Huichang county, Jiangxi province. [Photos By Zhang Xiao / China Daily]

Cattle, medicinal herb and dried tofu companies offer county's residents employment and wealth

Editor's Note: With preferential policies and financial support from the central government, some business-savvy residents in Huichang have started their own businesses to help not only themselves but also their fellow Huichang people alleviate poverty. Below we interview three of these entrepreneurs.

Fu Jianrong will never forget the night his wife, having just given birth to their third child, fell sick and he had no money to take her to hospital.

It was in the late 1970s in a village in Huichang, the southernmost county of South China's Jiangxi province.

Fu, desperate to find his wife treatment, borrowed 10 yuan ($1.50) from his cousin. But just as he set out to take his wife to a clinic, his cousin stopped him and asked for the money back, saying that his wife was mad at him for lending the money to Fu.

No one else would lend Fu the money, so he went home and burst into tears.

He did not give up, however. That night, he caught a bag full of pond loaches, which a doctor at the clinic accepted as a fee for treating his wife.

"I swore to myself then that nothing like that would happen to me again," said Fu, 63, now the owner of a medicine factory and cattle business.

"For a county struggling with poverty for generations like Huichang, whose young people are desperate to leave, the old people left behind have neither the motivation nor ability to make any change."

Since the 1990s, Fu has been collecting herbs to sell to wholesale vendors and medicine factories. This proved so successful that he eventually set up his own medicine company, to exploit the huge potential market value he discovered in a particular type of citrus rind.

He also imported Simmental cattle from Switzerland, which he uses to help villagers in Huichang lift themselves out of poverty.

"For instance, if a village has land and labor, I offer them cut-price calves and buy the cattle back at market price; if a village has only old people, I employ them to work in my farm or teach them to grow fodder," Fu said.