Village-stationed cadre Liu Wei: A good cadre who is stationed in the village and even more in the hearts of its people
Liu Wei, 35, is a cadre from the Development Center of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development. In August 2015, he came to Nanmeng Village, Langde Town, Leishan County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province, to serve as first secretary. For more than 1 year, under his leadership, the villagers have found new ways to increase their income and get rich, and the village has undergone great changes.
When talking about Liu Wei, the villagers of Nanmeng Village feel grateful for his dedication and devotion, and they told reporters two small things that moved them especially.
The village children have always crouched over narrow little stools to review lessons and do homework at night, sometimes able to finish only by the dim light at home or by candlelight. "Children in the city all have spacious, tidy desks and do homework, read, and go online under bright lights, but here the children's home study environment is so simple."
In April this year, Liu Wei and his classmates launched a public welfare crowdfunding campaign on a charity website called "I want a desk." In just 13 hours, they raised one desk and one desk lamp for each of the village's 150 children. In early May this year, the desks and desk lamps were delivered to the village, which moved the entire village, old and young alike, greatly.
Nanmeng Village has 194 households, and more than 100 people from the village work away from home, of whom more than 50 are engaged in the jewelry processing industry in Yiwu, Zhejiang. On May 1 this year, everyone held a fellow-townspeople gathering in Yiwu, and no one expected that Liu Wei would actually come to Yiwu in person to celebrate the holiday with them. "I have worked away from home for more than 10 years, and this is the first time I have received this kind of care, especially his words, 'The village is taking care of things at home, so please rest assured when you are away,' which made people cry," said villager Yu Hongxian.
The closeness between hearts has filled the villagers with trust in this outsider cadre. Village accountant Li Yuqiang said that when Liu Wei first arrived, he was afraid to eat chili peppers, but now he can eat anything. No matter whose home he visits, the villagers all want to keep him for a bowl of Miao rice wine, and he has long since become a "Miao village person."
What the villagers feel most deeply is the tangible change Liu Wei has brought to the village.
Nanmeng Village is one of the first batch of "Traditional Chinese Villages" and was also awarded the title "Home of Lusheng Dance Art" by the Ministry of Culture, but for many years the village had not found a way to get rich. In 2014, the village's poverty incidence rate exceeded 30 percent, and there was no collective economic income.
After gaining a clear understanding of the village's situation, in December last year, Nanmeng Village established the Gongji Rural Tourism Professional Cooperative. The cooperative set up a lusheng performance group, an ethnic handicraft group, an agricultural operation group, and an e-commerce group. Registered poor households joined the 4 groups according to their individual strengths and interests, and each group was linked with a corresponding market company.
The lusheng performance team invited a national-level intangible cultural heritage inheritor from a neighboring town to teach lusheng-making skills; the ethnic handicraft group regularly organized women for embroidery skills training; the e-commerce group established the town's first e-commerce warehousing and logistics center, and the village's tea, rice-field fish, red rice, Chinese bayberry, persimmons, and other agricultural products were sold through a Weidian store.
This cooperative model produced immediate results. Since the cooperative was established, it received an order for 2,000 embroidered teacup coasters worth 60,000 yuan, increasing the income of 30 embroiderers by 30,000 yuan; in the first quarter, through tea planting and sales, it achieved income of more than 60,000 yuan and distributed more than 50,000 yuan in labor income to villagers; in Leishan County town, the village cooperative also opened a "grilled fish restaurant," whose operating and service staff were all poor households from the village, and it also provided free training for villagers interested in learning barbecue skills and management. At present, 26 of the village's 35 poor households have achieved an average income increase of 5,250 yuan per household.
Through Liu Wei's efforts, Nanmeng Village also achieved full village wifi coverage, which is rare even among poor villages in Guizhou. This solved the problem of poor information flow in the mountainous area. The village now has a WeChat group, making it convenient for villagers to communicate, so problems can be reported and solved in a timely manner, and people working away from home can also promptly learn about what is happening in the village.
Liu Wei said that in the fight against poverty, at the beginning, the villagers were being pulled and dragged along, very passively, but now they are moving forward in step. He is happy about this change and hopes the villagers can move quickly. He told reporters that in the second half of this year, Nanmeng Village was listed by Qiandongnan Prefecture as one of 8 traditional village tourism development demonstration villages, bringing opportunities for the village's next stage of development.
Seeing the village change faster day by day, many villagers who have worked away from home for years plan to return to the village and work alongside everyone else. "As a person from the village, I should contribute even more to the village," said villager Yu Hongxian.
Xinhua News Agency reporter Li Qianyu