NANPING, Fujian: Huang Xiao'e is very grateful for the rural cooperative medical scheme (RCMS).

Lying in her hospital bed with her husband sitting beside her, she is recovering from an operation she has just had on her stomach.

Thanks to the RCMS, Huang's procedure at the township hospital near her home in Dunzhou village in the northern part of Fujian Province cost her just over a third of what it would have at a city hospital.