Focus: rural revitalization in NW China's Shaanxi

Over the past seven years, several large enterprises have taken root in the park and employed around 15,000 local residents. The settled enterprises are active mainly in intelligent manufacturing, special equipment manufacturing, high-end furniture, electronic products, plastic products, and textiles and garments.

As a key industrial poverty alleviation project, Shaanxi Leopard Suspension System Co Ltd was invested by Shandong Leopard Automotive Holding Ltd and launched at the end of 2018. It is estimated that the project can realize an annual profit of 22.6 million yuan and offer job opportunities to more than 300 people.

"We prioritize our job opportunities to the poor. So far, our company has 38 registered workers from poor households and they can earn 4,000-5,000 yuan per month," said Sun Qingkai, president of the company.

Famen town, four kilometers from Fufeng county, is renowned for its national 5A scenic spot Famen Temple, a Buddhist holy land, as well as the Zhouyuan Site, an important base for the archaeological research of the Western Zhou Dynasty (c. 11th century-771 BC).

Over the past few years, Famen town has taken advantage of the policy opportunity by focusing on the construction of a new-type of urbanization. It was listed in the second group of national characteristic towns in August 2017.

With a planning area of 12.6 square kilometers and a total investment of 1.3 billion yuan, the town has implemented comprehensive transformation and upgrading and laid out a public services core area, ecological agriculture demonstration zone and cultural tourism resort. Six hundred and fifty-eight households in Famen cultural scenic zone are engaged in accommodation and catering, souvenir processing and sales and business trade.

According to the 2019 Fufeng Government Report, in 2018, Fufeng county focused on the development of the culture of the rites of the Zhou Dynasty and that of the Han-Tang dynasties, receiving a total of 17.71 million tourists from home and abroad and achieving a comprehensive tourism income of 12.43 billion yuan, up 35.6 percent year-on-year.

Walking into the workshop of Fengxiang Huilan Folk Culture Co Ltd, you will be amazed to see dozens of women weavers skillfully operating their wooden looms and producing bright-colored cloth even when machine production has long been prevalent.

Homespun cloth craft is a traditional manual skill dating back thousands of years. It has been selected as a county-level intangible cultural heritage in Fengxiang because of the fabrics' bright color, rich symbolic meaning and complex manufacturing process.

Since its establishment in 2015, Huilan Folk Culture Co Ltd has continuously provided free training in weaving skills to more than 800 rural women. The company allows those who are disabled or cannot work away from home to make cloth at home and then exclusively purchases the products. In this way, more than 200 surplus rural female laborers from surrounding villages (including dozens of women from poor households) have stable jobs near their homes. With annual per capita income rising to over 15,000 yuan, their living standards have greatly improved.