Economic Daily:

The white paper mentions that in the process of building and maintaining rural roads, many employment opportunities have been created for local farmers. Could you please elaborate on this? Thank you. 

Li Yang: 

Thank you to the Economic Daily reporter for their attention to the issue of employment. With the development of rural roads in China, we always emphasize people's collaboration, participation, and common interests, so that all the people can enjoy the benefits of better rural roads. In the construction and maintenance of rural roads, transportation departments at all levels have paid close attention to creating more direct employment opportunities for farmers. While indirect employment opportunities have greatly increased due to rural development and the integration with the tourism industry, we have also directly created jobs through the construction and maintenance of rural roads, allowing farmers to increase their incomes through employment close to their homes. Specifically, there are two main approaches:

First is the promotion of work-relief projects in rural road construction and maintenance to draw more rural labor. This is due to rural road construction and maintenance both requiring large investments, which benefits a wide range of people and has strong potential to drive up local employment. To facilitate employment absorption, we have issued the Notice on Doing a Good Job in Work-Relief in Transportation Construction and Maintenance and have encouraged and guided localities to actively promote work-relief programs. We also issued a tentative guideline for implementation of work-relief programs in transportation infrastructure construction and maintenance to further enhance technical guidance. Last year, we conducted a survey and found that 3,946 rural road projects adopted work-relief approaches, directly drawing nearly 96,000 rural laborers, which included nearly 14,000 people from once poverty-stricken households.

Second is the development of public welfare posts in rural road projects. Through taking advantage of the large number of widely distributed rural road projects, we have vigorously developed related jobs, which have played an active role in helping poverty alleviation as well as promoting common prosperity among rural residents. While increasing the number of positions for employment, we have also focused on enhancing skills training for the workforce, not only providing employment opportunities but also improving their skills to better meet job requirements. Currently, there are about 850,000 positions directly available in the field of rural road management and maintenance.

These are some of the practical experiences we have gained through the development of rural roads. We will encourage localities to explore more ways to continue creating both direct and indirect employment opportunities in line with the development of rural roads. Thank you.