The urban-rural gap in China seems to widen further as seen in video on YouTube showing Sichuan school children climbing an 800-meter cliff using only an old bamboo ladder.
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AP says that the ladders are the only means of access for the 15 children, who return from boarding school to their village every two weeks.
Api Jiti, the head of the 72-member community, which mainly grows chilies and potatoes for their livelihood, said that there was no scope of building a school for the local children on the hilltop.
However, there is a ray of hope for the people in this remote village as the Liangshan Prefectural government that oversees the county has assured that it will build a set of stairs, which would be a stop-gap measure for this issue and have also assured that a long-term solution will be followed by it. They climb 17 separate ladders accompanied by two adults.
There is also the issue of access to the village which places the minority group members at the mercy of traders who could exploit the Yis because of the difficulty of carrying volumes of produce up or down the unsafe cliff.
The Communist Party Secretary General said that the most important issue they want to solve is the transport issue. The photos garnered even more attention after appearing on the front page of the English-language China Daily and other newspapers on Thursday.
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China pulled nearly 700 million people out of poverty following the implementation of economic reforms in the early 1980s and says less than 10 percent of the population still suffers from extreme privation. That’s absolutely nothing compared to the route children living in an isolated mountain village in China have to take.
