Seven departments, such as the National Development and Reform Commission and National Tourism Administration, jointly issued a notice about implementing rural tourism projects to promote poverty-relief work recently and published a list of key target villages. Hechi’s 63 villages were selected into the list in two batches.

The selected villages in Hechi were distributed in seven counties, which were Bama, Donglan, Fengshan, Du’an, Luocheng, Dahua and Huanjiang. A total of 21 villages such as Dahua’s Dawu village and Donglan’s Yongmo village were selected in the first batch and 42 villages such as Bama’s Cifu village and Luocheng’s Yihe village were in the second batch of the list.

The rural tourism people-benefiting project aimed to energetically develop rural tourism and increase farmers’ incomes in order to mobilize people in poverty-stricken areas to overcome poverty and achieve prosperity as quick as possible. The project planned to support about 2,000 poor villages by 2015 to carry out rural tourism and 6,000 poor villages by 2020, with an annual rural tourism operating revenue of one million yuan ($161,046) per village.

The selected villages will receive more funding input in infrastructure construction. Service facilities such as roads, footpaths, parking lots, toilets, water and power supplies as well as emergency rescue will be greatly improved. As for the construction of a transportation infrastructure, rural dilapidated housing rehabilitation, rural environment comprehensive improvement and traditional village and dwelling protection, the central government will increase its policy of financial support to strengthen their rural tourism development.