Hu Jihua, head of Lequn village, surveys the land worked by members of the local cooperative. This year, the village has lost tens of thousands of yuan's worth of crops as a result of disease and abnormally hot weather.Liu Hao\china Daily
When he was elected head of his village six years ago, Hu Jihua vowed to lift every one of the 4,000 residents - many of them disabled - out of poverty, and fulfill a personal dream at the same time.
The 38-year-old, who stopped growing at 1.4 meters tall as a result of a rare, congenital spinal disorder, was desperate to demonstrate that "anything a healthy man can do, I can do better".
He has set about proving his point.
Hu's idea was simple: Gather all available resources and focus on one thing at a time. He established a cooperative for the village and invited every resident to invest land or money.
The cooperative operates like a regular company, but with a twist. It sells farm produce and other local goods, and the villagers take a cut of the profits. But they also receive an annual dividend based on the sum they invested, even if the cooperative loses money.
Although the concept sounds simple, achieving their goal was anything but easy for Hu and his peers. They live in Lequn, a remote settlement tucked away in the mountains surrounding Liupanshui in Guizhou province.
Nearly 400 villagers - 10 percent of the residents - have physical disabilities, almost double the national average. According to official estimates, 85 million people in China have a disability, roughly 6 percent of the population.
One of the reasons behind the high disability rate in Lequn is generations of marriage between close blood relatives, according to Hu Jihua, the village head.
About 50 percent of the residents are members of ethnic groups, mostly the Hui, Buyi and Yi peoples, said Hu, who is of Yi origin. In previous generations, most of the groups forbade marriage with people of other ethnicities, and although the local government has tempered the tendency in recent years, the problems are likely to remain for some time. "What's done is done," Hu said, with a sigh.
Another reason is a problem that often affects isolated villages such as Lequn, where the primary activity is farming. About 20 years ago, the lack of other work resulted in younger villagers, mainly men, leaving home and heading to coastal cities, where wages were about 10 times higher, in search of jobs.
Most of them ended up on unregulated, dangerous construction sites, and their status as migrant laborers provided little protection if they became injured. Almost inevitably, a large number of them returned home with permanent physical damage.
