Under a portrait of 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 moved out of 38 mountain villages in China's southwest and into a newly built town, Chengbei Gan'en, in an anti-poverty initiative.
Farmers who tended mountainside plots now have jobs at an apple orchard. Children who had spoken only their own tongue, Nuosu, attend kindergarten in Putonghua.
"Everyone is together," says Ashibusha, 26.
While other nations invest in developing poor areas, Beijing doesn't hesitate to operate on a more ambitious scale by moving communities wholesale into new towns as the Chinese Communist Party has announced an official target of ending extreme poverty by the end of the year.
The party says such initiatives have helped to lift millions of people from poverty. But they can require drastic changes and fuel complaints the party is trying to erase cultures as it prods minorities to embrace the language and lifestyle of the Han - more than 90 percent of China's population.
At a time when the party faces protests by students in Inner Mongolia over plans to reduce the use of the Mongolian language in schools, officials want to show they are sensitive to minorities.
They invited media to visit Chengbei Gan'en and four other villages - Xujiashan, Qingshui, Daganyi and Xiaoshan - that are part of what's seen as a successful development project for the Yi in Sichuan's Liangshan prefecture.
Mass relocations still are carried out because some areas are too isolated, says Wang Sangui, president of the China Poverty Alleviation Research Institute of Renmin University in Beijing. "It's impossible to solve the problem of absolute poverty without relocation," he says.
In Sichuan, 80 billion yuan (HK$91.3 billion) has been spent to relocate 1.4 million people, according to Peng Qinghua, the provincial party secretary. He says that includes building 370,000 homes and over 110,000 kilometers of rural roads.
In Chengbei Gan'en, 420 million yuan was spent to build 1,440 apartments in 25 identical white buildings, a clinic, a kindergarten and a center for the elderly.
Craftspeople sell silver jewelry, painted cow skulls and traditional clothing that are popular with tourists. Yi women can study to become nannies, a profession in demand in urban China.
Roadside signs call on people to speak Putonghua. Murals on buildings depict the Yi with members of the Han majority.
In Xujiashan village, annual household income has risen from 1,750 yuan in 2014 to 11,000 yuan now.
Development initiatives can lead to tension as many have strategic goals such as strengthening control over minorities by encouraging nomads to settle or diluting the populace with outsiders.
In Inner Mongolia, students boycotted classes this month over plans to replace Mongolian-language textbooks with Chinese ones. The party faces similar complaints about suppressing local languages in Tibet and Xinjiang.
The party boss for Liangshan acknowledges the initiative isn't purely economic. Authorities want to eliminate "outdated habits," says Lin Shucheng. He lists complaints about extravagant dowries, too many animals butchered for funerals and poor hygiene.
But party officials say they are preserving Nuosu through bilingual education and support for a Nuosu newspaper and TV show.
The party might be willing to promote Nuosu because, unlike in Tibet or Xinjiang, the Yi do not demand political change, says Stevan Harrell, a University of Washington anthropologist.
"There is no 'splittism' in Liangshan,'' says Harrell, using the party's term for activists who want autonomy for Tibet and Xinjiang. "So it is kind of safe to have the Yi language as a medium of education."
And elderly villagers welcome a jump in living standards.
"You can eat whatever you like now,'' says Wang Deying, 83. "Now, even the pigs eat rice."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
China has moved 6,600 ethnic Yi into new homes and towns in a latest bid to alleviate poverty. ap
