Not sure how many of the people on this thread have actually been or lived in China. I have lived there about 2 years and travelled fairly extensively. I cannot speak to these specific villages, but the amount of people lifted out of poverty in China in the last 50 years is probably one of the greatest achievements in human history along with modern science, medicine and rule of law.
So far, I live most of the life in China, IMHO, the root of our previous poverty is arrogance and one man in power (see Mao's policy which had led nation wide famine just because he want to surpass US in a short time), and that left us fall behind the world economically. And the latter so-called "lifted out of poverty" (a oftenly used propaganda tune in Chinese spokesmen to refute others' human rights infringement bl…
if that was the case there'd be fewer poor countries on the planet. The Chinese government has made many mistakes, a lot of them quite terrible, but a lot of progress over the last few decades also is the result of successful and active governance. Statecraft is not something that just happens or that is trivial.
Even just creating an open environment and the sort of conditions that let hardworking people do what they want is difficult, successful ecosystems are built, they don't happen because everyone at the party office just drops their suitcase and goes home.