Tang Wanrong, director of the Foreign Propaganda Office of the Hekou County Party Committee, recently went to Vietnam to investigate. She learned from Vietnamese border residents, village cadres, and ethnic cadres of the Lao Cai Municipal Party Committee that Vietnam has implemented a free medical policy in border rural areas since the 1990s. The specific method is: the state conducts statistics on the people in the frontier rural areas every three years, and issues a free medical certificate to each registered rural population. Villagers who hold the certificate can enjoy free medical care in all national hospitals in Vietnam.
In the investigation, Tang Wanrong found that the experience of Yang Chunyun, a villager in Old Liuzhai Village, Xiangwanzi Village, Qiaotou, Hekou County, can typically reflect the impact of policy differences between the two countries on border residents. According to Yang Chunyun: In 1998, his grandson Yang Lishan was treated at the People's Hospital of Maguan County because of a kidney stone, which required more than 5,000 yuan to heal. From a poor family, he had to take the child home. Later, a Vietnamese friend came to the house and learned of the child's condition, and suggested to take it to Vietnam for free medical treatment. He sent the child to the home of Xiang Xiaoshuang, a Miao woman married from China in Mengkang County, Vietnam. Xiang Xiaoshuang took the child to the hospital in the name of her son for free treatment and saved the child's life. Ma Chaoyun's child in the same village also suffered from kidney stones, but lost his life because of lack of money to treat the disease.
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Now, Vietnam provides free education for the children of border residents, and also provides living allowances to poor students and minority students. At the same time, it adopts ethnic language teaching, attracting many Chinese border residents to send their children abroad to study. ...Some border residents complained: "The country is so big and richer than Vietnam, but why is the care for border residents worse than Vietnam?"
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In addition to cultural, geographical, and economic proximity, our reporter found through investigations that one of the important reasons for the real “blur” of the border is Vietnam’s increasingly accelerated innovation and preferential border residents’ policies. According to investigations, Vietnam is indeed speeding up the construction of border areas and encouraging people to settle on the border. The Vietnamese government subsidizes asbestos tiles for Vietnamese border residents who relocate to the border, and relocating households can borrow interest-free loans not exceeding RMB 3,000.