Improving quality of people's life a principle of Shanxi government

An acrobatics troupe performs in a village in Shanxi. Enriching the cultural well-being for rural residents is a part of the province's efforts in livelihood improvements. [Photo by Li Zhaomin for China Daily]

Shanxi has achieved steady and high-quality development over recent decades, allowing this North China province to make a hefty investment in improving people's livelihoods.

Adhering to a principle of being people focused, governments at various levels in Shanxi have devoted energy to promoting employment, safeguarding social security, improving services for education, healthcare and the care of seniors and the underprivileged, as well as launching infrastructure projects related to livelihoods.

In the southeastern Shanxi city of Jincheng, for instance, vocational training is popular not only among ordinary job seekers, but among university graduates.

Dou Yunhe is a graduate from Jincheng Open University. He took part in a training program called Qinhe Miners.

The program was established by the local government in partnership with local businesses as part of their efforts to address concerns over employment.

"The training began when I accepted the job offer from the Yonghong Coal Mine, a subsidiary of the local coal-mining giant Qinhe Energy Group," Dou said. "Our class consisted of students who had signed job contracts with Qinhe Energy, one of the partners of the program."

Qinhe Miners is now a renowned training brand in Jincheng. It is a tailor-made program for local enterprises. The enterprises place orders with the school, buying training classes for their newly recruited employees.

According to Dou, the training is free for students and the curriculum has been designed by the demand-side enterprises. "When I was at the school, I studied intelligent mining, obtaining skills related to various kinds of smart operations."

He added that the training had helped him quickly adapt to his new career. He is now a technician at Yonghong Coal Mine.

Jincheng launched the Qinhe Miners program in 2020. By the end of 2022, the program had trained 3,232 employees for local enterprises.

Across Shanxi, vocational training is among the measures to boost employment. Local statistics show that more than 6.2 million people in the province have received training at various vocational schools.

The province intensified its efforts in employment promotion this year by applying 18 new measures to help job seekers.

One such measure is organizing job fairs for job seekers. Statistics show that a total of 4,207 such fairs had been held in Shanxi by the end of September.

Over the first three quarters of this year, Shanxi saw an addition of 426,000 jobs for urban residents, fulfilling 94.69 percent of its annual target.

Another achievement in improving Shanxi people's livelihoods is expanding the coverage of its government-sponsored social security system, which includes pensions for seniors and insurance for basic medical care, unemployment, workplace injury and birth.

Statistics show that more than 95 percent of Shanxi residents are covered by the basic medical care and pension systems. The unemployment, workplace injury and birth insurance systems have achieved 100 percent coverage.

Now that a nine-year compulsory and free schooling system is in place, Shanxi's authorities found there is still room for improvement in the education sector. One is to offer a safe lunch for primary and middle school students. Shanxi launched a safe lunch program in 2022. The program covered 275 schools and has expanded to another 284 schools this year.

Another effort of the Shanxi authorities is to relieve the burden of underprivileged students in higher-learning education.

This year, the province began a program to aid physically challenged students and students from families with physically challenged members. Their tuition fees at universities or colleges are now covered by the government. The latest statistics show that a total of 5,806 students are receiving this assistance.

Meanwhile, preschool education is not being left behind in Shanxi although it is not a part of compulsory education. Over the past five years, the province has built more than 3,000 affordable kindergartens. The move is aimed to balance the allocation of resources for preschool education, especially between the urban and rural areas, according to local officials.

In the medical service sector, Shanxi is encouraging leading medical institutions in bigger cities to branch out, allocating more resources to county-level regions and rural areas.

Shanxi is now implementing a "double-thousand" campaign throughout the province, dispatching more than 1,000 experienced medics to aid the development of rural medical services and upgrading more than 1,000 rural clinics with better equipment.

Gao Jianhua contributed to this story.