Although average rural incomes have failed to keep pace with rising urban incomes, some people in China’s countryside are managing to thrive. Here, Ren Xuping (任旭平) tells Chang Tianle (常天乐) about his journey from poverty to relative prosperity in rural Sichuan, and how this led him to become a social entrepreneur.

Musapir, a native of Kelamayi (克拉马依) in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, is a police cadet in the Peoples’ Public Security University of China. In July 2006 he posted the following story on a website devoted to Uighur affairs.

During this summer vacation the school arranged for us to go to Shenzhen on a two month internship. The people and events in this story are all real, but for their security and for other reasons some names have been changed.

The danwei where I did my internship was a local police station (派出所) in Shenzhen city’s Bao’an (宝安) district. Around midday the day before yesterday we received a call saying some of our people on the beat (巡防人员) had arrested a thief in front of a commercial plaza. After taking the call, a police officer and I went together to the scene and found that the thief was a boy from Xinjiang, the same place I come from. He had been stealing a cellphone from someone’s bag, but the victim noticed.

According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, in 2004 less than one percent of Village Committees and village-level Communist Party Committees in China’s 653,000 administrative villages were headed by women.Wu Jing’ai (吴京爱), 53, is one of those rare women. A loyal Communist Party member, she has led her village to relative prosperity. Speaking in her native, Shandong dialect, she told Tina Qian (钱霄峰) about her life and career in grassroots politics and development.

Village doctor Zhang Changjian (张长建) has just had his clinic closed by local authorities. His offence? A decade of activism, trying to draw government and media attention to a wave of illness that, he claims, is caused by a local chemical plant. Tina Qian (钱霄峰) listened to his story.

An unexplained growth disorder meant that Zhang Xuanbao, 23, never reached four feet tall, but that didn’t stop him from leaving his village in search of fortune. Tina Qian listened to his story.

Fu Shengjun grew up in a state orphanage in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province. He has since travelled to Wales and Denmark as a representative of disabled people in China. Here he talks to China Development Brief staff writer, Tina Qian, about changes in the orphanage, where he now works, and about his new life as a disability activist.

In Xinzheng (新政), a town 40 kilometres to the south of Zhengzhou in Henan, a Returned Migrant Women’s Friendly Association (返乡打工妹联谊会) provides mutual aid for its thirty members and other women who want to start their own businesses. Christine Warmer met Gao Wei, Li Feng and Yang Yi, who helped found the Association in 1999. Having also started businesses, the three women are regarded as success stories. But success isn’t their whole story, as they tell here in their own words.

The following account of a young Sichuanese worker's venture into to the bright lights of Guangzhou appeared in the newsletter of the Chinese NGO, Migrant Worker's Document Handling Centre.