Xie Libing on rural revitalization: Whether a village is prosperous or not depends on the Party branch
Mapping the village, leading villagers out of poverty
Narrator: Xie Libing, First Secretary of the Party Branch of Huashan Village, Xinshao County, Hunan
"This kind of urban cadre has come to gild his resume, he won't last long." "He holds an iron rice bowl, he's just here for sightseeing and a taste of rural life." ... Last March, the State Grid Hunan Electric Power Company assigned me to Huashan Village as the leader of the poverty alleviation work team and First Secretary of the Party branch. Right after the meeting that day, the local villagers were already gossiping behind my back.
Before the work had even begun, I was given a show of force. To be honest, I was quite disheartened at the time. The mountain road to Huashan is winding and tortuous. Could my "road to the countryside" be the same?
Whether a village is prosperous or not depends on the Party branch. The company leaders encouraged me: if you can lead the people to prosperity, they won't treat you as an outsider.
One word awakened me from a dream. I decided to start by getting familiar with this "battlefield." Led by the village Party branch secretary, I walked every corner of the village. Whenever I saw villagers at home, I would knock on the door and go in for a chat. After more than a month, I drew the village's first detailed village conditions map: whose land, whose home, all clear at a glance; clan and neighbor relationships, all perfectly clear.
The "family assets" were also figured out: the whole village had little land and few people, the village collective owed tens of thousands of yuan, there were 76 impoverished households and 234 impoverished people. I knew that poverty alleviation was my number one task as First Secretary.
How to stage a turnaround? At meetings of the village Party branch committee, I always raised this question, and in private I would discuss it back and forth with several people from the village Party branch.
The bottleneck was the lack of projects, lack of funds, lack of capable people. The poverty alleviation timetable waits for no one, and this situation had to be broken. Once, while chatting with villagers, I heard that villager Lü Yong was working away from home, had accumulated some capital, and had the idea of returning to his hometown to start a business, but was hesitant. Could I persuade him to return to the village and start an agricultural development project? I immediately contacted him. After more than 10 rounds of communication, Lü Yong finally made up his mind. Afterward, several village cadres and I helped him apply to the county for a low-interest loan and scouted locations.
3 mu of fish ponds, 3,000 chickens, 3,000 ducks, 10 mu of oil tea. At present, Lü Yong's project has already begun to take shape. What is even more surprising is that the project has also provided employment for more than 200 people in the village, boosting the villagers' confidence in getting rich through farming.
Impoverished household Shi Shengguang has five people in his family. His mother is deaf and mute, and his granddaughter suffers from mental illness. In the past, the family relied entirely on government assistance. Now he relies on Lü Yong's breeding base to raise pigs. The first pig went to market in June this year and sold for 2,750 yuan, which was his family's entire income for a whole year before.
In the past, when the village held Party member meetings, people were not enthusiastic. Now when a meeting is called, everyone shows up promptly, no roll call needed. An old Party member chatted with me: Secretary Xie, it's only when the village committee charges forward together with us that life feels worth living.
Rural grassroots Party building must "blow away the chaff and see the rice." After serving as First Secretary for more than a year, I increasingly understand that the village Party branch, as the village's vanguard, can only win the people's recognition and trust by leading them to increase their income and become prosperous. As the saying goes, "Grasping Party building is grasping development, and grasping development is grasping Party building."
When I worked at my original unit, I was also in charge of the commercial electricity fee office, doing work like reviewing electricity prices and calculating electricity fees. Everyone used to joke that I was an electricity fee "shopkeeper." Now, as this shopkeeper, what I am calculating is precisely the "abacus" of Huashan Village's poverty alleviation and prosperity, with the village Party branch and 26 Party members standing behind me.
(Interview and compilation by Hou Linliang, reporter of this newspaper)