CHENGBEI GANEN, China: Under a portrait of President Xi Jinping, Ashibusha sits in her freshly painted living room cradling her infant daughter beside a chair labeled a gift from the government.
The mother of three is among 6,600 members of the Yi ethnic minority who were moved out of 38 mountain villages in Chinas southwest and into a newly built town in an anti-poverty initiative.
Farmers who tended mountainside plots were assigned jobs at an apple plantation. Children who until then spoke only their own tongue, Nuosu, attend kindergarten in Mandarin, Chinas official language.
Everyone is together, said Ashibusha, 26.
While other nations invest in developing poor areas, Beijing doesnt hesitate to operate on a more ambitious scale by moving communities wholesale and building new towns in its effort to modernize China….