A Glimpse at Guizhou Province

Guizhou—The Land and Her People
An ancient Chinese proverb opens a window on Guizhou:

Guizhou people are so poor, they don’t have three coins to rub together.
Guizhou land is so rugged, a patch of level ground is never more than three meters square.
Guizhou weather is so bad, there’s never sunshine for three days in a row.

Guizhou’s 36 million people live in a mountainous land that mostly lies between 3,300 and 4,600 feet above sea level. The province covers 68,000 square miles on the eastern slope of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.

The Plateau is composed of soluble carbonate rock limestone. As it erodes, it produces the spectacular karst formations seen in the Stone Forest in neighboring Yunnan Province; the caves and waterfalls of Guizhou, including Huangguoshu Falls, the biggest in Asia; and the famous landscapes of the Li River near Guilin in Guangxi Province.

Guizhou is primarily an agricultural province, with 82% of the population living in rural areas and coaxing a living from thin, rocky soil. Land reforms in the late 1970s helped to enlarge agricultural surpluses and a wide variety of goods are now produced. Enjoying an average of 270 frost-free days, Guizhou farmers produce grain—rice, rape (for oil and animal fodder), millet, and maize—and an almost continuous supply of fruits and vegetables, from watermelon to cabbages and eggplant.

Industry is increasingly important to the 12% of Guizhou’s population who reside in the province’s two main cities, Guiyang and Anshun. Guizhou possesses some raw materials—mercury, silicon, phosphorous ores, and coal—that are fueling development of a small industrial base.

Guizhou, like much of remote China, is a cultural melting pot of ethnic groups. Han Chinese, China’s majority ethnic group, make up 66% of the population. The remaining 34% consists of several ethnic minorities, with the Miao and Bouyei people representing a large share. Half of China’s seven million Miao people live in Guizhou; about 2.5 million Bouyei people live in the province.

Dress, customs, festivals and religious beliefs, and architecture distinguish each ethnic group. Miao women are famous for their embroidery and silver jewelry. The Bouyei are highly skilled in stonemasonry and batik-cloth dyeing.

Guizhou Economics
Guizhou is one of the poorest of China’s 31 provinces and municipalities. In 1999, the United Nations Development Program reported that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Guizhou Province grew by a scant 1.4% from 1990 to 1995, while Beijing’s GDP improved by a whopping 36%.¹ The Economist recently reported that urban residents now earn an average of three times as much as people living in the countryside.² For example, in 2000, Beijing’s urban dwellers had an annual income per capita of $1,250, compared to the peasants in rural Guizhou with $166. Guizhou’s city-dwellers didn’t fare much better, with $620 annual income per capita.³

Poverty is concentrated in rural China, where two-thirds of the population live and where 90% of China's poor live. One village teacher told Moore that the peasants who live in the karst mountains "not only lack grain, money, and farm tools, but also they cannot be assured of enough water, edible oil, salt, or even housing."

This clearly demonstrates the fact that in China economic opportunities are severely stunted as you move westward in China from the coast. The steel and glass of Shanghai are nowhere to be seen in China’s vast heartland, where much of life is just as it has been for thousands of years.

Copyright © 2008 Gwen Moore Children of China Fund. All Rights Reserved.