Three quarters of the people in Xinglong are farmers, with the majority being fruit growers. Trees of apple, hawthorn and chestnut have covered the scarce flat land at the bottom of ravines and the foot of mountains.

With a large portion of their income coming from fruit sales, volatile market prices and extreme weather are among the factors that can significantly cut their annual income and, in extreme cases, make it even impossible to make ends meet on their own.

Taking Wang's family for instance. It had a good harvest of 2,500 kilograms of hawthorns this year, but a huge influx of hawthorns produced elsewhere plummeted the price to 1.2 yuan (18 cents) per kilogram, half of that in 2009.

Worse still, no outside dealers are willing to drive on roads half way up the mountain to the village to buy Wang's hawthorns, if the fruits are available in more accessible areas.

Unable to live on their own, Wang's family now benefits from increasing government spending on social welfare, receiving a monthly living allowance and two one-time allowances annually from the government.

Besides providing the living allowance, the county government has taken measures to reduce the risks in working in agriculture, while in the mean time seeking to develop tourism and other industries to free its residents from their reliance on vulnerable agriculture.

"We will focus on developing tourism to lure some 1.5 million tourists from Beijing and Tianjin in the next five years," said Qi Haidong, vice county head of Xinglong.