Retracing routes

In July, Brown, along with professors and students from Xiamen University, made a 32-day 20,000 km drive around China to revisit the places he'd seen in 1994 and to gauge the pace of the country's changes.

"I was surprised when I traveled to remote places in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region and Gansu province back in 1994 that the government had already started building roads to remote villages," Brown said.

"I understood the humanitarian aspect, but it did not seem profitable from a business perspective. How could the government ever earn back the investment in roads in such poor places with so few people?"

When he revisited those remote places last year, he was impressed to see that the government had continued to develop even the poorest areas. "Every place we visited, from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region in the north to the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, Gansu, Qinghai province and the Tibet autonomous region in the west, had beautiful concrete roads," he said.

He said two farmers from remote villages in Ningxia and Yunnan told him: "We were like frogs in a well. Without roads, we could not leave our remote villages to sell products or seek jobs. Today we're free."

China's world-class infrastructure has helped the nation gradually lift people out of poverty, Brown said."And another major change is that every place I visited, the government has helped build new houses for the villagers."

In most places, the government has shouldered 30 to 40 percent of the cost of the houses and the villagers pay the rest.

However, in extremely poor places, the government has shouldered 100 percent of the cost for new homes and handed the keys to the impoverished villagers, he said. "For the poorest, they even supplied furniture and bedding,"Brown said.

The government has also offered free education to impoverished children and vocational training to help adults get jobs, he said.