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Fu Xiurong is, at 34, the youngest deputy from the island province of Hainan in South China.
A member of the Li ethnic group, Fu is the top legislator of Jinbo Township, a mountainous area composed of 18 villages and located some 200 kilometres south of Haikou, the provincial capital.
Her "constituency" has a population of 4,286 -- 90 percent of whom are of Yi ethnicity.
Her job is to push for faster economic development in the township, which is still listed as poverty-stricken.
Rubber, sugar cane, cassava and fruit are the township's main cash crops and the per capita income reached 2,206 yuan (US$266) last year. This was a 4 percent increase on the previous year but still lower than the average per capita rural income of 2,476 yuan (US$298) in the country.
She has worked hard to promote education, technological training and restructuring of local industries.
She has helped villages develop cash crops such as sugar cane and papaya with some village households starting to earn about 400 yuan (US$48) a month.
Now, as a new NPC deputy, Fu feels an increasing responsibility on her shoulders.
"I will represent all my brothers and sisters in the whole county to perform my sacred duty," said Fu, who has come to Beijing to attend the congress with three new sets of traditional Li ethnic costumes.
After a thorough investigation in grassroots villages, she has drawn up five proposals for the congress, urging the central and local governments to take more concrete actions to promote education, forest preservation, the training of scientists, ecological poverty relief and infrastructure building in the central area of Hainan Province.
There are still more than 40,000 people living below the poverty line in Baisha Li Autonomous County, where Jinbo township is located, she said. "Education is developing at a slow pace and there is a shortage of talented people."
She said the hardest part of her work is to encourage villagers to transform their traditional farming ideas, since local farmers have grown rice for generations.
Fu is happy that some villagers are taking the lead. In Hongcun Village, after the farmers took up sugar cane, their per capita income increased to 2,130 yuan (US$258) last year from 1,400 yuan (US$169).
Fu grew up in the county town. She first went to Haikou, the provincial capital and then to Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province, for her college studies.
Since graduating in 1990, she has worked at the grassroots-level township administration.
(China Daily March 5, 2003)
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