The story of a post-90s entrepreneur's perseverance
Li Qiangqiang, a big boy born in the 1990s, took on the heavy burden of life and set out alone on the arduous road of entrepreneurship when children his age in the city were still acting spoiled in front of their parents and enjoying the sweetness of a pampered life.
When we met him, he had just returned from running errands in town. Driving a clumsy blue farm vehicle, he made a sharp turn on a very steep downhill road and drove straight into the narrow yard of his chicken farm. The chicken farm sits on a flat top of a mountain ridge, surrounded by deep mountains, and it looks so steep that one cannot help but sweat for him. He got out of the cab, looking very shy, and invited us into his room that serves as both office and dormitory.
Li Qiangqiang is tall and wears a camouflage uniform. From years of labor and exposure to wind and sun, his face has a healthy red glow, and the heavy labor and pressure of entrepreneurship cannot erase the youthful innocence on his face.
Li Qiangqiang's room looks very simple. Under a dirt kang are placed two pairs of yellow rubber shoes covered in mud. On a table are several instruments that look like old-fashioned radios. Li Qiangqiang told reporters that they are not radios but wind power generation equipment. It turned out that this place is high in the mountains and far away, and there was no electricity on the mountaintop. During his entrepreneurship, this was a major problem he faced. Because if electricity were connected from Wangshan Village at the foot of the mountain, the labor costs, material costs and other expenses would add up to nearly 100,000 yuan. No electricity was absolutely impossible; raising chickens could not do without electricity, as the chickens needed to be warmed.
In the end, he solved the problem with 30,000 yuan. In his first days on the mountaintop, he discovered that the wind here was very strong and fierce, sometimes even blowing the wooden boards he had prepared for building his house all over the place. He thought, why not use wind power? So he went online to look up information, found professional books to study, bought equipment and assembled it himself. The blades he uses for power generation are installed on the roof of the house, like a windmill stretching high into the sky. Now, both his household electricity and the electricity for raising chickens are no problem.
His house was also built by his own hands. The house is a simple structure, and from design to buying materials, he completed it together with friends and family. His father was firmly opposed to his son resigning to start a business, as this was too far from his expectations for his son. At first, when building the house, his father refused to help out of spite, but in the end, he still felt sorry for his son and helped him build it.
This year Li Qiangqiang has one wish, which is to renovate the house and change it into a brick house. Li Qiangqiang said that the wind here is really too strong. Sometimes when the wind rises in the middle of the night, the sound outside is like the roaring of cattle, and it feels as if the whole house is about to be blown away by the wind.
Li Qiangqiang is from Wuzhai Village, Sancha Town, and graduated in 2013 from Lanzhou City University with a major in environmental science. In May 2014, he began free-range chicken farming, and in the same year registered and established the Wuzhai Ecological Breeding Professional Cooperative, beginning his arduous entrepreneurial life.
After Li Qiangqiang graduated from university in 2013, he originally found a job in engineering inspection at Lanzhou Petrochemical Company. The salary during the internship was 3,500 yuan a month, and after becoming a regular employee it would rise to more than 6,000 yuan. This is the path most students would take, and for him, who had come all the way from the countryside after ten years of hard study, it was a good outcome. Then he could work steadily at the company, be diligent and capable, and live a safe life to the end. But Li Qiangqiang still did not want to live his whole life this way, so just as his internship was about to end, he chose to resign.
While still in university, the national policy of advocating and supporting college students' independent entrepreneurship matched his restless heart and ignited his youthful dream. After returning home, he rushed around and obtained a 100,000 yuan college student entrepreneurship loan. Together with a middle school classmate as a partner, they raised a total of 130,000 yuan. With the help of the township government and the village committee, his Wuzhai Ecological Breeding Professional Cooperative was established.
The cooperative is located on the mountaintop of the mountain ridge, which belongs to Wangshan Village, Shancha Township. The mountains here are high and the valleys deep, and the drought is severe. The whole village has 8 groups, with more than 1,000 people scattered across the mountain.
When he first came, the road leading from the winding mountain highway to the mountaintop was a small path that could only fit a handcart. In order to improve this road, Li Qiangqiang squeezed out time early in the morning and late at night to widen it. Blisters appeared on his hands, and he could not even grip tools, but Li Qiangqiang still gritted his teeth and persisted. Zhao Chengtang, the village director of Wangshan Village, said that he truly admired this child's spirit of enduring hardship. Children in rural areas nowadays are also spoiled and cannot bear such hardship, so Director Zhao, during the slack farming season, helped Li Qiangqiang repair the road together with villagers. Later, when the Sancha Township government learned of this, it was also moved by his spirit and allocated funds to widen and repair it. Now this road has a sand and gravel surface, and ordinary motor vehicles can travel on it without problem, but the road winds around the mountaintop with cliffs on both sides, so traveling on it still makes one very nervous.
The hardships of entrepreneurship were not only these. Li Qiangqiang remembers that last winter, a heavy snow fell for several days, making the road impassable. The corn for the chickens was gone, so he found a way to collect corn from farming households. After collecting it, he carried it bag by bag up to the chicken farm. Although the road was only 1.5 kilometers, it was covered in snow, and if he was not careful he would fall. He got up and kept walking, and on the day he carried the most, he carried more than 500 jin. In this way, after carrying several thousand jin of corn, he was also exhausted.
When asked why he did not build the chicken farm down the mountain, where life would be convenient in every way, he said that this place is all forest and the ecological environment is good. Since it is ecological farming, the environment must be strictly required, and this is also being responsible to customers.
Li Qiangqiang said that in nearly two years of entrepreneurship, his products have sold well on the market, but all the money he earned has been used for the development of the chicken farm. Last year the chicken market was not good, so he was already preparing to produce native eggs and was in the process of creating his own brand. No matter how hard the road of entrepreneurship is, he will persist and develop his business and make it grow.
The villagers of Wangshan Village also believe in this young man with vision who can endure hardship. Last year, during targeted poverty alleviation loans, 4 households of villagers brought capital into the enterprise, totaling 200,000 yuan. Li Qiangqiang said that he will not disappoint the villagers who trust him, and will work hard and work harder to lead the villagers together toward prosperity and a moderately prosperous life.