Xuan Yan walks a trail in the hills where the villagers grow tea. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

China National Aviation has also invested more than 1 million yuan in helping the village build a new bridge to replace a dilapidated one, which helped addressed safety concerns and enabled villagers to sell more specialty products to the outside world.

Xuan has also visited all 363 impoverished families in Jiangkou, a 33-square-kilometer mountainous village, to learn if they had benefited from the preferential poverty-relief policies and make sure they had received government subsidies for the rural poor and had access to the national medical insurance network for rural residents.

Although Xuan's two-year tenure was scheduled to end in July last year, he said he has decided to stay for another six months so that the village's poverty-relief achievements are consolidated and the risks of villagers falling back to poverty are properly addressed.

"I have to admit that the working and living conditions here are very rough, but I feel so fulfilled working on something that matters to my fellow villagers," he said.