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Fu Xiurong is, at 34, the youngest deputy from the island province
of Hainan in South China.
A
member of the Li ethnic group, Fu is the top legislator of Jinbo
Township, a mountainous area composed of 18 villages and located
some 200 kilometres south of Haikou, the provincial capital.
Her "constituency" has a population of 4,286 -- 90 percent of whom
are of Yi ethnicity.
Her job is to push for faster economic development in the township,
which is still listed as poverty-stricken.
Rubber, sugar cane, cassava and fruit are the township's main cash
crops and the per capita income reached 2,206 yuan (US$266) last
year. This was a 4 percent increase on the previous year but still
lower than the average per capita rural income of 2,476 yuan
(US$298) in the country.
She has worked hard to promote education, technological training
and restructuring of local industries.
She has helped villages develop cash crops such as sugar cane and
papaya with some village households starting to earn about 400 yuan
(US$48) a month.
Now, as a new NPC deputy, Fu feels an increasing responsibility on
her shoulders.
"I
will represent all my brothers and sisters in the whole county to
perform my sacred duty," said Fu, who has come to Beijing to attend
the congress with three new sets of traditional Li ethnic
costumes.
After a thorough investigation in grassroots villages, she has
drawn up five proposals for the congress, urging the central and
local governments to take more concrete actions to promote
education, forest preservation, the training of scientists,
ecological poverty relief and infrastructure building in the
central area of Hainan Province.
There are still more than 40,000 people living below the poverty
line in Baisha Li Autonomous County, where Jinbo township is
located, she said. "Education is developing at a slow pace and
there is a shortage of talented people."
She said the hardest part of her work is to encourage villagers to
transform their traditional farming ideas, since local farmers have
grown rice for generations.
Fu
is happy that some villagers are taking the lead. In Hongcun
Village, after the farmers took up sugar cane, their per capita
income increased to 2,130 yuan (US$258) last year from 1,400 yuan
(US$169).
Fu
grew up in the county town. She first went to Haikou, the
provincial capital and then to Shenyang, capital of Northeast
China's Liaoning Province, for her college studies.
Since graduating in 1990, she has worked at the grassroots-level
township administration.
(China Daily March 5, 2003)
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