Gao Jie, leader of villagers in a Hunan mountain village on the road to prosperity, and one of the most admirable grassroots officials
In August 2015, 29-year-old Gao Jie was selected by the Ministry of Finance and sent to Hengchong Village, Pingjiang County, Yueyang City, Hunan Province, to serve as first secretary. In more than a year of living in the village, Gao Jie quickly completed the role transition from a "capital official" to a "village official."
"I was born in the countryside and grew up in the countryside. After graduating from university, I returned to my hometown of Wendeng City, Shandong Province, and became a college-graduate 'village official,' working in the countryside for 3 years. In August 2015, I was selected by the organization to serve as first secretary in Hengchong Village, Pingjiang County. Returning to the countryside again, my heart was full of emotion," Gao Jie said.
"The countryside is a society of acquaintances. Only by closing the distance with the masses can outside officials overcome the symptoms of being 'unaccustomed to the local environment.'" From last August to now, Gao Jie has eaten and lived in the village. In order to close the distance with the villagers, he put in a great deal of thought. When elderly people in the village over 80 years old celebrated their birthdays, he paid out of his own pocket to send a birthday cake and, together with village officials, wished the elderly people a happy birthday. Over more than a year, Gao Jie sent out 47 birthday cakes in total, expanding his "circle of friends" in the village and also bringing people closer together.
Among the 428 households in Hengchong Village, 29 are poor households. The village's resource conditions are poor, and the village-level collective economy is "utterly impoverished." In this ordinary village where "the mountains are not clear and the waters are not beautiful," how should industry be developed and villagers led out of poverty toward prosperity? This was the problem Gao Jie faced when he first arrived in the village.
Although Hengchong Village has no resource advantages, Gao Jie discovered that Hengchong Village, located in the central area of Anding Town, does have locational advantages: national highways, county roads, and township roads pass through the village, it is only a few kilometers from tourist attractions such as the Du Fu Tomb and Ancestral Hall, and it is a necessary route to Fushoushan National Forest Park and Shiniuzhai Scenic Area.
Gao Jie had a sudden inspiration. He thought it would be better to mobilize the villagers to establish a folk tourism professional cooperative. So he persuaded Wu Tao, a college graduate who had returned home to start a business, to initiate and establish Hengchong Village's first folk tourism professional cooperative, organizing villagers to develop rural homestays and farmhouse dining, with the cooperative providing unified management and training for farming households and uniformly equipping them with household bedding and toiletries. The operating income from homestays and dining is divided between the cooperative and participating farming households at a ratio of 3:7, achieving mutual benefit and a win-win result.
In September 2015, villager Qiu Anmin joined the folk tourism cooperative. He converted his two-story small building into a homestay inn, installed air conditioning in the 4 rooms upstairs, and set up a total of 5 beds. "Every weekend, my small inn is fully booked with tourists coming to visit," Qiu Anmin said.
With Gao Jie's help, villagers Yu Sizu and Wu Puqiu, a married couple, opened a farmhouse restaurant. In August this year, when the lotuses bloomed in the village, the restaurant launched special seasonal dishes such as lotus leaf free-range chicken, lotus flower spare ribs, and lotus seed soup, attracting the attention of a large number of out-of-town diners. "When business is good, we have to set up 9 tables for a single meal," Yu Sizu said.
In order to let tourists stay comfortably in the village, Gao Jie mobilized the villagers to carry out environmental improvement throughout the village. Party members and group leaders took the lead in rectifying the "dirty, messy, and poor" conditions in front of and behind villagers' houses, demolishing cattle pens and pigsties, and also bought seeds online and sowed chrysanthemums, cosmos flowers, sunflowers, and so on along the roads.
"Today, the village already has 22 homestay inns, 3 farmhouse restaurants, more than 100 standard guest rooms, and a daily reception capacity of 200 people. There are also 5 households of villagers building new homestay inns," Gao Jie said.
In November 2015, Gao Jie struck while the iron was hot and initiated the establishment of the "Hengchong Maker Home" in the village, mobilizing the village committee to vacate office space and provide it free of charge for entrepreneurial young people to use as an office, serving as a rural entrepreneurship incubation center and building an entrepreneurship platform for college graduates returning home, veterans, and young talent from outside.
During this year's Spring Festival, taking advantage of the opportunity that young people working away from home were returning one after another to celebrate the New Year, Gao Jie, starting from the first day of the lunar new year, held entrepreneurship mobilization meetings for 6 consecutive days, calling on the village's educated "post-80s" and "post-90s" to return home and start businesses.
At Gao Jie's call, Yang Shulin, a graduate of the Economics Department of Hunan Agricultural University, decided to return home to start a business. She returned to the village to serve as marketing department manager of the company and head of the e-commerce platform. "Now there are online orders every day. The e-commerce platform has already sold more than 100,000 yuan worth of specialty agricultural products such as free-range eggs, free-range chickens, goose eggs, bamboo wine, and dried bamboo shoots, and we also use online platforms such as Meituan and Ctrip to attract tourists to stay in the homestay inns," Yang Shulin said.
Gao Jie told reporters that in February this year, Hunan Xiangye Ecological Agriculture Development Co., Ltd. was registered and established, adopting a public-private partnership model, with 14 entrepreneurial young people investing and holding 60% of the shares, and the Hengchong Village collective holding 40%. The youth entrepreneurship team is responsible for the company's management and operations, and the village selected Deputy Party Branch Secretary Qiu Pingyuan to serve as chief supervisor, exercising supervisory authority on behalf of the village collective over the company's business operations and major decisions. At present, the company has multiple profitable projects including rural homestays, farmhouse dining, educated-youth bar, rural horse ranch, and e-commerce platform. Relying on Hunan Xiangye Ecological Agriculture Development Co., Ltd., Gao Jie and the villagers established an official website as well as online marketing platforms such as a WeChat public account and Taobao store.
Gao Jie said: "I discussed Hengchong Village's development approach with the village party branch and village committee and returning makers. We made clear a new path for collective economic development with rural tourism as the core industry, corporatization and marketization as the operating model, e-commerce platforms as the marketing method, and a benefit-linking mechanism as the bond."
"Today, Hengchong Village is cooperating with 5 surrounding distinctive villages to create a clustered rural tourism destination. If we work another year, we will strive to make the village collective economy's annual income exceed 300,000 yuan and lift all 29 poor households out of poverty!" Gao Jie said confidently. (Reporter Shuai Cai)