Bright ideas keep village ahead

This is the typical story of a farmer-turned-entrepreneur in China, and the ambition of its hero is typical of grassroots officials worldwide - to build a small utopia where everyone can enjoy life.

What makes Li Liancheng - the hero of the story and deputy to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China - different is that he not only achieved his goal, but also did it fast.

Ever since he became the Party secretary of Xixinzhuang Village in Puyang of Henan Province in 1991, his village has turned from one of the poorest places on the Loess Plateau to one of the richest in the whole nation.

The village Party committee now provides free two-story buildings to each of its 172 households, free electricity, free tap water and even free broadband Internet access. It pays for the education of all its kids and medical care of all its residents.

The village derives its wealth from light bulbs. There are 18 bulb factories at the village either owned collectively by the villagers or by Taiwan and foreign companies. More than 7,000 people, mainly from neighboring villages, work at these factories.

Not one of the villagers, who now run the bulb factories, would deny Li's contribution to their prosperity. Li was, in fact, so successful that residents of the neighboring Dongxinzhuang Village also voted him to be their Party secretary last month.

"People vote for me because they believe I can lead them to prosperity," said Li. Back in the 1980s, he was the richest man in the village when his neighbors were still struggling for the bare necessities of life.

When farmers divided land at the end of the 1970s, which was one of the first steps in the nation's reform, Li realized he could never get rich if he went on growing corn and wheat, as others did on the plateau.

Opportunity came his way in 1983, when a new oilfield was discovered nearby and workers flooded into the area. Li predicted there would be a great demand for vegetables and he was right. He made money from tomato, cucumber and pepper, and his neighbors also profited as he shared with them the skills and technologies to grow vegetables.

When his village became rich by selling vegetables, the county government decided that the whole county had the potential to be developed into a vegetable production base, and poured money to build greenhouses in the villages that were still poor.

Seeing this, Li forecast vegetable prices would fall and began to pool money with fellow villagers to build a paper box factory.

Not many people then believed in his ability to manage a factory, and he got money from only 13 families - about 10,000 yuan ($1,330) each. Li himself invested 60,000 yuan ($8,000). In 1994, the factory opened and within 12 months it raked in a profit of more than 1 million yuan ($133,000).

Impressed, the villagers took out their savings to buy shares of the factory. It became collectively owned, and so were more than 10 factories built in the following decade. After several attempts at various products, the village began to focus on bulbs.

But Li is still not satisfied. He now plans to shift focus to medicine, and the village is building a pharmaceutical factory and recruiting personnel for it.

"My village needs a stronger competitive edge than cheap labor and good management. That edge can be hi-tech," said the illiterate farmer-turned-entrepreneur.

(China Daily 10/19/2007 page25)