China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Role model helps village out of poverty
Local entrepreneur’s efforts in Henan province bring big improvements to farmers’ livelihoods
Pei Mingjun, a farmer in Peizhai village in Henan province, always shows off his two “red books” — his real estate certificate and “shares” paper.
Polio in his childhood left the young man with a pronounced limp. He married a disabled woman and had a son, but they were too poor to raise the baby without assistance.
There were eight poor families like Pei Mingjun’s.
Pei Chunliang, Party secretary for Peizhai village’s Communist Party of China committee and an entrepreneur with a corporate group, gave each of the eight families shares worth 20,000 yuan ($3,080), on which they can receive annual dividends of more than 2,000 yuan.
“I hope that no one is left behind when the village works so hard for a decent life,” Pei Chunliang said.
Pei Chunliang’s family also was poor when he was a child. “The sense of hunger is my only memory of childhood, when I never had a hearty meal and new clothes,” he said.
Hit by misfortune
Pei dropped out of school during his eighth-grade year. He was touched by the help he received from relatives and neighbors, whom he turned to when he needed to borrow money to pay his father’s hospital bills.
When he was 16, his father passed away, and his family could not afford a funeral. His father was buried with the help of fellow villagers.
Misfortune continued to hit Pei Chunliang’s family, and his mother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He had to take care of his three young nephews and nieces, getting food and clothes from people in the village. He had to quit school and start to make a living by working at a brick and tile plant, for a monthly wage of 40 yuan.
In 1987, he found that the barber shop in the village was doing a good business. After learning haircutting skills, Pei opened his own barbershop.
Several years later, the barbershop was expanded, and he began to sell hardware and electrical materials to increase his profits.
In 1999, he started to invest in the mechanical casting, mining and hospitality industries. The successful investments made him a wealthy entrepreneur in Huixian, and soon afterward he was elected as a representative of the local legislature of Xinxiang, Henan province.
In April 2005, Pei Chunliang decided to run for the head of Peizhai village’s neighborhood committee and won by a landslide.
Meanwhile, with only one well, Peizhai was one of the two most impoverished places in the city of Huixian. Local residents drank rainwater and the water they stored in cisterns.
In eight years, the shortage of water, which had been a serious issue in the village for generations, was solved. Deep wells were dug, irrigation projects were completed and a reservoir was built.
Pei Chunliang donated 51 million yuan of the 60 million yuan used to build the reservoir.
With the reservoir ready, Peizhai villagers removed their previous houses, which were dilapidated, to reclaim more than 40 hectares of farmland, on which they built greenhouses for green vegetables, flowers and aquaculture. A vegetable and flower cooperative was formed, with every household being a shareholder. It sells vegetables such as edible mushrooms directly to markets.
Responding to the Chinese government’s new type of urbanization, which focuses on people-oriented urbanization, in which relocation helps to improve people’s living conditions, Pei helped build a large rural community including 11 villages of more than 11,800 residents. Peizhai village serves as its center.
Peizhai village has also seen other significant changes, with new facilities such as a primary school, kindergarten, health center and sewage treatment facility, as well as a heating system and natural gas supply.
“Now we have whatever cities have. A bank, supermarket, hotel, you name it,” Pei Chunliang said.
To provide people in the large community with job opportunities, he helped build a clothing industry park, inviting garment companies from Henan and Jiangsu provinces and Shanghai to move in. More than 2,000 local farmers work there.
“We call the park the ‘let love come home project’,” Pei Chunliang said. “Young couples in rural areas usually leave their kids and old parents behind for work in cities. When they return to their hometowns for a once-a-year reunion during Spring Festival, their kids are too shy to call them mom and dad.”
Everyone in this big, new type of community has a job and becomes a shareholder. The per capita annual income has increased from less than 1,000 yuan before 2005 to nearly 20,000 yuan now.
In 2014, the Chinese government implemented a strategy of targeted poverty alleviation, which allowed the central government and local officials to address the needs of individuals and households rather than entire villages. According to President Xi Jinping, the targeted poverty alleviation campaign followed an approach based on policies in the areas of industrial development, social security, education, ecological compensation and relocation.
The campaign also implemented nationwide initiatives to facilitate industrial development. In 2019, China spent $19 billion on a variety of infrastructure initiatives. Through these initiatives, China has been able to build or renovate more than 200,000 kilometers of roads and provide internet access to 94 percent of rural villages.
Large donation
Pei Chunliang, meanwhile, found out that four villages with a total of 453 households and a population of 1,798 still lived in harsh mountain conditions at an elevation of more than 900 meters. It was impossible for them to eliminate poverty on their own, so he donated 80 million yuan to a local government-supported relocation project.
He also raised more than 500 million yuan to build a tourist resort in Xinxiang. Some of the resettled villagers have worked at the resort, and around 2,000 people living near the resort started their own businesses, such as bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants and souvenir shops.
Pei Chunliang was among the award recipients at the meeting in Beijing on Oct 17 to mark China’s poverty alleviation accomplishments and honor the campaign’s role models.