Host: Hello, everyone, welcome to our talk show Unveiling Yunnan. Today we have Mr. Patrick Nijs, Belgium's former ambassador to China, to speak with us. Good afternoon, Patrick.

​Patrick: Good afternoon, Christine.

Host: First of all, could you please introduce yourself to the audience?

​Patrick: Yes, as you said my name is Patrick Nijs. I used to be an ambassador of Belgium in China from 2009 to 2013. I have had a quite long diplomatic career before this post as an ambassador. A few highlights：I had been a director general for consular affairs before moving to Beijing which means that I was actually in charge for all the consular affairs of Belgium worldwide, which means visa, passport, protection of Belgians. Since 2013, when I stepped down from my position of ambassador in Beijing, I decided to move to Yunnan and at the same time doing the consultancy. So I am advising Chinese companies moving to Europe, and also the opposite. I would like to depict myself as a facilitator, global facilitator. This is a label that I coined out for myself. When I decided to change my life, when I came to decide what would be the focus of my last step in my life, I am quite naturally went back to environment. And I think the situation since the 70s even in the 60s, it's not going for the better. So I need really to do everything I can for the last maybe 20, 10 or 2 years, I don’t know. I still have to stay on this beautiful planet, have to do something.

Host: Why did you move to Dongchuan, but not another city in Yunnan?

​Patrick: Because Minyan is from Dongchuan. What I knew is that I wanted to retire in Yunnan. I love Yunnan, Yunnan is such a beautiful place. It reminds me a bit of Africa where I was born. It's a kind of a mixture between Africa and China, Africa at the beginning of my life and Yunnan at the end. So I want to live in Yunnan. Minyan had a friend who was actually running this place. Actually this place didn’t work. there was no water, no electricity, it was far from everything. When we came here there was nothing, just the beauty of the nature, and I said to Minyan, “that's the place where I think we should settle” Minyan said, “Why, are you sure?” I said, “Yes! Here we can really combine you as a Chinese me as a foreigner. We can combine our differences in order to do something useful, which should be help the community to move to ecology in the most deep going and sustainable way.”

Host: Do you enjoy about your rural life? What it is like?

​Patrick: I love this place. I really want to end my life by being part of the nature. This is what matters for me. I don't think I am above nature. I think I'm part of it.

Host: You seem to growing a lot of crops and trees, How is the harvest this year?

Patrick: This may be the first time that we really have a harvest. We came here in 2012, so 8 years already setting the place you know, having a place where you can leave in a comfortable way. So we didn't really have time to think about harvest. What we did is to protect the soil and do whatever it takes to stop harming the soil. I mean we have a business plan（Kabissa）, so we know how much income we need to have a balance in our management here, but we are not expecting that much from the crops yet. It will take time to set up a brand and to come to a point where we can really are. It will take five years I think to get to this point. So we have this tree magic combination of the Incas (maize, bean, squash) and then we have a lot of fruit trees and we have apples, we have a lot of peaches, we have apricots. We have many different fruits, and then we have roses. This is Minyan’s real focus. Minyan is fond of flowers. She really loves flowers. So she wants to do everything possible with the petals of the roses you can see, and our roses are really very organic. There is nothing like fertilizer, there is nothing like pesticides. It's really the nature we do nothing.

Host: I know you and Mrs. Deng are exploring permaculture or sustainable agriculture. How is this concept different from what your neighbors are doing?

Patrick: You know the villagers, they are very surprised to see me coming here. Nobody was expecting a retired ambassador to come in such a remote place. So they are looking at us, they are looking at me. I don't speak the dialect, so this is a very big problem for me, I can not really engaged in the daily life. I always say “ting bu dong, ting bu dong” (I don’t understand, I don’t understand), I am Mr. Ting Bu Dong (I don’t understand),so I need Minyan to help me a lot with the translation. I think what I need to do here is to set up a community of like-minded people in order to work together, to start up a real communication with them, but it will also take time for me to have my own crops which can be a convincing. You don't move so easily from the traditional intensive monoculture to organic farming. It takes a lot of time. In order to make this movement possible, we need to make Kabissa strong with a community with people who can help to make myself understandable. If Chinese people coming themselves, engaged him organic farming, these people, they can talk to the farmers, they can interact much better than I can do myself. I am very interesting because I'm opening the door, massively bang, I opened the door. The ambassador is coming, what would this guy? So everybody is looking. This is a very good starting point. To make it happening, I need a team, I need people, I need a community, and this is what we are building up.

Host: In your opinion, what is the biggest change in Dongchuan in the past seven years?

​Patrick: Infrastructure is incredible. We have been through incredible times when they built the highway from Dongchuan to Wulong. It was terrible. It took us two hours and a half, sometimes three hours to drive through a kind of nightmare. This huge highway in the mountains, breaking everything, So now you come smoother up to Wulong. It's very smooth. The emphases that they have put on an infrastructure is tremendous. They changed the city.

Host: How to stabilize the achievements and prevent people from returning to poverty?

​Patrick: Dongchuan used to be a very famous spot for copper mining and this has been the case since the Ming Dynasty. At the time there was even no roads. It was like the tea horse. It was the copper road. This road was going from Dongchuan to Yibin and then going to the Yangtze to take the Great canal to go to Beijing with the copper from Dongchuan. It was very famous because the emperors were using this copper, also to make the coins they were used in the time. This copper history is something which is very unique. I think we can do a lot around this. I take the example of what happened in southern Belgium Wallonia. This used to be places very famous for mining of coal and steel and now all this industrial spots, they are converted into museum or special places to do photography, or you can even go in some mines which are kept. You can see what the miners did. It's incredible, you go very deep in the ground by lifts and I think we can do this in Dongchuang as well. I think there is still a possibility to bring back old industrial sites to explain about this history.

Host: You know China will move forward to win the battle against poverty this year. How do you think China is doing in this fight?

​Patrick: Well, you know this is amazing. When I go to Europe, people are always asking me a lot of questions in order to understand China. There is a lot of misperception about China in Europe, I always tell them, if you want to understand really the essence of what the government is doing in China, you have to come to the countryside and you will see massively how the Chinese government is actually investing in the countryside in order to alleviate poverty. This is incredible. I mean there is a policy. There is a lot of investments in infrastructure. We have Wi-Fi here, and not only us but the village has Wi-Fi. Each village(s) has its own identity. Everybody is actually cooperating in order to brand the village and make a living out of the brand and multiply the products that they can invent under qualities and the added values of the places. So I think this is what we need to do today.

Host: Thank you very much, Mr. Patrick, for coming to our program today. It was really a great pleasure talking with you.

Patrick: My pleasure, really.

Host: Thank you for your watching. See you next time.

See you.