Located in mountains in southwest China's Yunnan Province, Zhenxiong, with a population of 1.71 million, used to see almost one in every three people living in poverty. There were still over 120,000 impoverished residents in the county by the end of last year. As one of the poverty alleviation policies, local government has made efforts in recent years to help residents to go out of the impoverished mountain areas and to find job opportunities in more developed cities. In recent years, more than 20 poverty alleviation cadres from Zhenxiong who were stationed outside Yunnan like Zhang have helped many people in poor, mountainous areas in the west get employed in developed coastal areas in the east. The county also helped the poor find jobs by organizing job fairs, inviting 153 recruiters from Guangdong, Zhejiang, Anhui, Shanghai, and Chongqing with some 50,000 vacant jobs. Statistics show that 666,100 workers in Zhenxiong got support through employment transfers in 2020, accounting for 86 percent of the county's total labor force, and 264,400 of these people were from registered poor households. While striving to send the labor force out for work, Zhenxiong authorities also encouraged more skilled people to return home with technologies and capital to start their own businesses. At present, a total of 5,741 people are employed at home in 97 poverty-alleviation workshops in Zhenxiong, according to Zou Xingyu, director of the county's employment bureau. In mid-November, Zhenxiong County was delisted from the poverty-stricken county list.
