Wang Guangguo carved a road through the sheer cliff, and built an even greater road to prosperity
"Carrying poles and back baskets, even to sell a pig you had to carry it in a 'sedan chair'." More than ten years ago, Dianziping Village, at an altitude of over 1,200 m, was a high-mountain village with no road, and villagers could only climb along a narrow footpath on the cliff when they went out.
In early 2005, Wang Guangguo, Party branch secretary of Dianziping Village, Jianshi County, Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Hubei Province, began leading the villagers to build a road. It took them 6 years to carve out a 7.5-kilometer village road through the cliff.
For carving a road through the sheer cliff, Wang Guangguo received a string of honors: delegate to the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, deputy to the National People's Congress, one of the most beautiful village Party secretaries in the country...
"In the past, with no road, we were looked down upon." Now that the visible road has been opened, where is the invisible road to prosperity?
In 2013, Wang Guangguo proposed that corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes were the "old three staples" grown by the people of Dianziping, enough only for a bare living, and that traditional agriculture had to shift to specialized agriculture.
He organized village officials and village representatives to go out for inspections and repeated discussions. Later everyone unanimously decided to develop the "new three staples" of kiwifruit, konjac and flue-cured tobacco, making them the "main industry" for villagers to escape poverty.
Wang Guangguo went to the county and secured a batch of free kiwifruit seedlings, which were distributed to households. But some conservative-minded villagers were unwilling to plant them, and some simply returned the seedlings.
To persuade everyone, Wang Guangguo took the lead in converting all 8 mu of his own fields to grow kiwifruit. He also made a special trip to a supermarket in the county town to buy kiwifruit for everyone to taste.
"These kiwifruit cost 7 yuan per jin, they are delicious and nutritious, and they sell very well. If one mu can produce 500 jin, everyone calculate how much that would sell for?" Wang Guangguo's words dispelled everyone's worries.
Through an introduction by a friend, Wang Guangguo brought in the Shanghai Dexin Farm Company, which invested more than 1.4 million yuan in Dianziping, leased villagers' land, and built a contiguous kiwifruit base.
The kiwifruit planting area in Dianziping Village has already exceeded 500 mu, and this year is the first year of large-scale harvest.
Villager Liu Taigui, stroking the fruiting kiwifruit in the field, said with a smile: "Everything Guangguo set out to do, he accomplished. I trust him. I planted 2 mu of kiwifruit, and this year an income of seven or eight thousand yuan is no problem."
The "new three staples" became the villagers' "new path" out of poverty and toward prosperity. The village's per capita net income rose from 2,360 yuan in 2011 to 7,414 yuan in 2015, which gave Wang Guangguo full confidence.
"By the end of this year, Dianziping Village will be completely out of poverty. We have also set the goal of raising the farmers' per capita net income to the provincial average by 2018," Wang Guangguo said.