On Feb 19 last year, President Xi Jinping used a remote news reporting system at Xinhua News Agency to talk with a correspondent in a village in Lankao county, Henan province.

He said that the work of grassroots officials is integral to the Communist Party of China's rule and is directly linked to the people's interests. He added that journalists should visit grassroots areas more often and do more in-depth reporting on the work being done there.

I was working in Kenya as a reporter at the time and the president's request resonated with me. I couldn't agree more that reporters should reach out to grassroots environments. So I soon joined my peers from other media outlets, including Xinhua and China Radio International, and traveled to some of these areas. We visited construction sites of Chinese companies abroad and went to places where Chinese experts are working on aid projects, many of which are in remote, isolated areas that had never been visited by a Chinese journalist before.

My visit to China Gezhouba (Group) Corp's construction project in Ethiopia remains fresh in my mind. The site is more than 700 kilometers away from the capital, Addis Ababa, and it took us 12 hours to get there.

The trip convinced me even more of the need to go to grassroots areas for in-depth reporting. The Chinese workers and their Ethiopian counterparts all washed themselves with murky water. I washed my face with it and found many parts of the white towel that I used to dry my face yellowed by soil.

When I returned to Beijing in June, I noticed a change in my colleagues' work style as well: There was a lot more attention being paid to grassroots environments.

During the past year, more stories about people from the grassroots environments have appeared in our newspaper.

For instance, we sent six groups of reporters to six grassroots areas to report on the efforts being made to lift people out of poverty. The series of videos we made entitled Breaking Out of Poverty have been viewed more than 10 million times online.

It has been a year since the president's request, but I think we can never have too many stories about grassroots environments. The world needs more of such reporting to better understand China, and we will make greater efforts to meet such needs.

houliqiang@chinadaily.com.cn

China Daily reporter Hou Liqiang talks with residents living near to the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway line in Sultan Hamud, about 110 kilometers southeast of Kenya's capital, Nairobi, in May.Li Baishun / Xinhua