Jinshun village has humble origins
These days, nobody would imagine that 40 years ago, Jiangxi’s Jinshun village — currently known as the province’s “No 1 village” for its incredible development — was extremely poor and had a per capita income of just 74 yuan.
Everything changed when then 26-year-old Luo Yuying was selected to be village leader in 1984, a development that would enable villagers to become the authors of their own histories.
“I come from the grassroots, so I am first of all an ordinary villager, and then village Party chief,” said Luo, stressing that her focus for decades has been on making peoples’ lives better.
Jinshun is located in the rural region of Nanchang, the provincial capital, and has a population of 1,391. Before the reform and opening-up, most of its inhabitants were farmers, a traditional way of life that dates back thousands of years.
Luo was forced to think hard about how to best encourage prosperity. In the 1990s, she decided her best bet was to bring in foreign businesses and investment by offering them land, leaving the capital and operation teams to be provided by investors.
However, with limited land and few investors, Luo was faced with a challenge. She began by emptying out an abandoned warehouse and making other vacant lots available for use by new businesses, and then poured her efforts into finding investors.
Her aim was to bring German international wholesaler and retail giant Metro AG to the village. In the late 1990s, she traveled to Metro’s China office in Shanghai for five consecutive years during the Spring Festival holiday to try to meet with the company’s executives, but she was always unsuccessful.
Then one day, one of the executives arrived by car at the Metro China building while Luo was outside. She seized the opportunity to meet the executive, and the Party chief from a village a thousand miles away was finally able to share her vision of collaboration.
This impromptu 10-minute chat eventually opened the doors to a new commercial existence for Jinshun, and Metro officially opened in the village in 2004.
According to Lyu Guoman, the then vice-president of Metro China, it was not just the village, but also its Party chief’s persistence that persuaded Metro China to invest in Jinshun.
Luo’s footprints are also visible outside Jinshun. In 1998, the village bought about 33.33 hectares of land from private entities and created three industrial zones that are home to 40 companies.
This smart move made Jinshun 12 million yuan ($1.7 million) that first year. By 2021, the village’s collective income had amounted to 59 million yuan, and its per capita income stood at 35,600 yuan, up from 17,639 yuan 10 years earlier.
“As a grassroots official, I have to keep the Party’s goals in mind and do all I can to help people toward common prosperity, making their lives better,” she said.