Editor's note: The Sichuan-Tibet Plateau, a beautiful region that reaches toward the heavens, is a place showered with blue skies, covered in white clouds, and dotted with snow-covered mountains, but recently, something truly remarkable has been materializing among the households that call this place home. A groundbreaking historic change has been reshaping the land and its people. From today on, we will publish a series of stories to tell you those changes. 

"Farming Machinery Garage 4S" is the locally given name of one of the Lower Ringo cooperatives. The garage rents farming machinery and repairs and maintains tractors and motorcycles. 50 thousand yuan in the county government's poverty-relief funds were used as an investment, and in August of 2016, services officially began to be offered to local villagers.

"The cooperative has several functions: to increase the income of the village collective, to solve unemployment among poor households, to upgrade the skills of poor villagers, and to facilitate the repair and maintenance of local villager machinery," appreciatively states Oudro Zerang, village party secretary and chairman of the cooperative.

Oudro has skills in machinery repair and maintenance, and is in charge of the collective's daily operations. Ever since founding, the main mission was clear: to find a way to solve unemployment among local villagers. Within six months, poverty-stricken villagers like Lorong Dengpa and Gyarong Tashi were asked to go to Oudro for instruction on how to perform certain skills, and whoever attended was paid with a monthly salary. Today, the apprentices have finished their training and are now able to move forward as workers in the machinery maintenance and repair industry!

Most Lower-Ringo families have their own tractors and motorcycles. This garage also provides maintenance services, only charging villagers the most basic of costs. According to Oudro, repairing a tractor often costs somewhere between 30 and 40 yuan, which is an immensely convenient price for locals. Oudro is also able to repair three to four types of farming machinery, and there is a multi-functional harvester available for villagers to rent at a cheap price so that they can harvest their crops more easily and efficiently than ever before.

The Chinese version of this story is written by Huang Yingliang & Liu Kung and translated into English by Huang Wenjuan. And the story is sourced from the United Front Work Deparment of the Communist Party of China (CPC)Sichuan Provincial Committee.

Editor: Ana Wu