Peppers add touch of spice to tale of recovery

HEFEI－Dong Heqin had his back in the 1980s as a successful entrepreneur. Then a string of misfortunes befell him, and he became one of the poorest in his village.

Now, the 67-year-old is on his way to becoming a millionaire thanks to a nationwide poverty-relief campaign that aims to eradicate absolute poverty in China by the end of this year.

Dong's life changed in 2015 when he started to grow peppers.

"I had a bad credit rating when I was on the poverty list around 2014, when I was so disheartened that I could hardly hold my head up while walking in the village," says Dong, a farmer from the village of Yanmiao in Funan county, East China's Anhui province.

Life was completely different in the late 1980s when Dong opened a brick factory and made his first bucket of gold. As the richest man of his village back then, Dong was the first to build a two-story house in the area.

However, in 1989, a heavy flood washed away his factory and left him in crippling debts. "People lined up in my doorway to ask for their money back," he recalls.

After that incident, he took over a scrapyard in Beijing and worked there to pay off his debts. Many years later, his business started to boom, yet more challenges soon followed.

Due to environmental concerns, Dong's scrapyard was forced to close down as the capital was gearing up for the 2008 Olympic Games. Shortly after in 2003, his son became mentally ill, and the treatment bills from the well-known hospitals his son went to started to pile up, draining his bank account.