The "Tea Secretary" Leads Villagers onto the Road to Prosperity

"Under Zhang Xiaoping's leadership, our village planted Golden Guanyin tea bushes, the villagers have work to do, and their wallets are getting fuller and fuller." Speaking of village Party branch secretary Zhang Xiaoping, villager Xiang Haigen couldn't help but give a thumbs-up.

Guanpuyang Village was once one of the 13 villages in Lanju Township with concentrated low-income farming households. Its farmland consisted mainly of mountain-ridge fields, grain yields were low, and in earlier years much of it was left fallow. After extensive research with the village's two committees, Zhang Xiaoping settled on the development approach of "developing the tea industry and building a Golden Guanyin demonstration village."

At first, many villagers were not optimistic about tea cultivation. So Zhang Xiaoping went door to door doing ideological work. Unexpectedly, the Golden Guanyin tea bushes planted in the first year had a mortality rate of 80%, and quite a few villagers began to back out. But Zhang Xiaoping did not give up, and sought out teachers everywhere to learn the craft. Hard work pays off, and the second year's planting finally succeeded.

After the trial tea planting succeeded, more and more farming households were tempted, but the pressure of funding made many hesitate. Zhang Xiaoping made numerous trips to relevant departments, and with persistence and tenacity successfully established a provincial-level demonstration site - the Longquan City Guanpuyang Village Development Mutual Aid Association - to issue loans to tea farmers and solve their urgent needs. As of now, the association has a total of 139 member households and has issued a cumulative 2.38 million yuan in loans.

While expanding the tea planting area, Zhang Xiaoping did not forget to work hard on tea processing and sales. He hired professional technicians from Fujian, Hangzhou and other places to "preach and teach," introduced advanced production and processing technology, and actively encouraged villagers with the means to set up processing plants and promote standardized production. At present the whole village has 9 tea processing plants, and the village's per capita income rose from 3,195 yuan in 2005 to 12,140 yuan in 2015, with tea alone increasing villagers' income by more than 5,000 yuan.

Golden Guanyin has become Guanpuyang Village's golden calling card, and Zhang Xiaoping has come up with a new idea. He said he wants to develop the village's beautiful tea gardens into a tea-themed park, integrating the tea industry with sightseeing tourism, to further raise the profile of the Golden Guanyin tea industry and extend the villagers' road to increased income and prosperity even longer and wider.