Kaihua's ecology-driven prosperity helps farmers shed the label of poverty

Report from our correspondent (Reporter Zhu Haiyang) "Almost every household has a car, every road is paved right up to people's doors; every household has its own sewage pipe, and greenery can be seen everywhere; last year, the per capita income of farmers even broke 20,000 yuan." Speaking of the changes in recent years, Zheng Chuyi, Party secretary of Jinxing Village, recounted them one by one with great pride. Looking across all of Kaihua County, Zhejiang, villages like Jinxing have been increasing in number in recent years. How did they shed the "poverty cap" and become "green, prosperous and beautiful"? It is all thanks to the development path of ecology-driven prosperity.

Ninety percent of Kaihua is mountains, and because it is located in a remote area with inconvenient transportation, development here was once extremely difficult. In 1998, Kaihua took the lead nationwide in establishing the strategy of "building the county on ecology," and in 2003 it formally made the creation of an ecological county an important driver for promoting economic and social development. For the sake of green mountains and clear waters, Kaihua strictly guarded the "ecological gate," exercising a one-vote veto over polluting enterprises. After the turn of the new century, it rejected a total of 65 polluting projects, involving more than 10 billion yuan in investment.

But what about development? As with many "backward villages," this was a question Jinxing Village had to answer: ten years ago, a car was hard to find in Jinxing Village, only one village road in the whole village was paved, and the rest were all mud roads. Open-air toilets and garbage pits could be seen everywhere, more than 70 percent of villagers worked away from home year-round, and per capita net income was only a few thousand yuan.

"The General Secretary's words immediately hit on exactly what excited us!" Speaking of the scene back then, Zheng Chuyi is still excited. It was August 16, 2006, when Xi Jinping, then secretary of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee, came to Jinxing Village for research. He instructed Zheng Chuyi: "Everyone has something to do, every household has income; this is the new countryside."

Jinxing Village seized the opportunity of forest tenure reform, confirming the rights to nearly 10,000 mu of mountain forest to households, and then produced famous tea through a "cooperative + farmers" model. In the past only a few households grew tea, but now it has grown to more than 300 households, with a tea garden area of more than 1,000 mu. As the village was built more and more beautifully, the late-mover advantage of green mountains and clear waters began to stand out. In 2013, Jinxing Village pushed hard into rural tourism. Now the entire village is a 3A-level scenic area, villagers have opened 10 farmhouse inns, and last year a tourist reception center was also completed.

"Adhering to 'building the county on ecology' does not mean abandoning economic development. Green prosperity for the people still has to be built on the foundation of development." Xiang Ruiliang, Party secretary of Kaihua County, introduced that after more than ten years of exploration and practice, a path of "green development and ecology-driven prosperity" has gradually become clear, one that takes ecological and environmental protection as its premise, relies on the ecological leisure tourism industry as its support, and takes improving people's quality of life as its core.

Qixi Town is located at the junction of Zhejiang and Anhui and is the town at the very source of the Qiantang River. The town has a very large area, with mountains everywhere, yet a population of less than 7,000. Developing industry was impossible, so the town took a different path and chose a leisure and sightseeing industry based mainly on farmhouse inns and homestay economy. Now, 7 of Qixi's 10 villages have become demonstration villages for farmhouse inns, with more than 200 operators in total, and popularity is growing ever stronger, one might say with unlimited "money prospects."

The reporter's interviews found that in recent years, looking at Kaihua's industrial structure, the tertiary industry, including ecological tourism and the cultural industry, has risen steadily. In 2014, its share exceeded that of the secondary industry for the first time, achieving a historic leap. Data show that last year Kaihua completed nearly 2.1 billion yuan in tourism investment, received about 6.9 million tourist visits in total, and total tourism revenue exceeded 4.2 billion yuan.

Researcher Song Hongyuan, director of the Rural Economic Research Center of the Ministry of Agriculture, commented that Kaihua's more than ten-year path of ecology-driven prosperity is both a beneficial exploration of the road of new-type agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics, basically achieving "efficient output, safe products, resource conservation, and environmental friendliness"; it is also a vivid practice of the "three rural" dream in China's building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, achieving "strong agriculture, wealthy farmers, beautiful rural areas, and urban-rural integration."