Foreign experience provides determination to change lives

Yuan Xiangsheng has been the head of Nanzhanglou village in East China's Shandong province for 42 years. "I am probably one of the few village heads who made business trips to foreign countries in the 1980s," he said.

Starting in 1989, all the cultivable land in Nanzhanglou was redeployed in a systematic way and leveled to facilitate mechanization, assisted by the Hanns Seidel Foundation from Germany, which works to promote civic society.

Out-of-season vegetable planting, livestock rearing and agricultural byproduct processing were introduced to the village during the project, raising farmers' average annual incomes.