A post-90s young man returns home to start a business and leads poor fellow villagers to prosperity

Sun Hui, 22 years old, relying on support from the local government, grows Salvia miltiorrhiza (red sage) and leads his fellow villagers onto the road to prosperity.

On May 5, in the hillside fields north of Beisun Village, Puji, Zhangqiu, Sun Hui was demonstrating how to dig up Salvia miltiorrhiza; with one swing of the hoe, the bright red roots leaped out along with the soil. Today, many villagers have begun growing this medicinal herb, Salvia miltiorrhiza, and the total planting area in the village has now reached nearly 400 mu, with a yield of up to 2,000 kg per mu and an average net income of more than 6,000 yuan per mu. This is inseparable from Sun Hui's efforts.

In early 2015, Zhangqiu promoted the cultivation of medicinal herbs throughout the city, and Beisun Village quickly planted a trial plot of more than 10 mu with success. However, the "victory in the first battle" did not bring an enthusiastic response, and most villagers still had many concerns: although the trial plot had shown initial results, was all the village's land suitable for growing medicinal herbs? If large-scale planting were carried out, how could the quality of the herbs and the market channels be guaranteed? Just at this time, a young man born in 1994, Sun Hui, also set his entrepreneurial direction on the medicinal herb industry.

Through his entrepreneurial experience and market research while at school, Sun Hui found that traditional Chinese medicine health products and traditional Chinese medicine cosmetics were quite popular. After graduating from university in July 2015, he decided to return home to start a business. Taking advantage of Zhangqiu City's vigorous development of Chinese herbal medicine cultivation, he registered and established Shandong Zehui Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., and through active coordination with the town and village, transferred 300 mu of land, while the factory was built by backfilling a barren gully on the principle of not occupying arable land.

The small-scale cultivation of Salvia miltiorrhiza let the ordinary villagers who had been half-doubting at first taste the benefits, but how could more villagers, especially the poor, share in this benefit and targeted poverty alleviation be advanced? The Beisun Village Party branch and Zehui Pharmaceutical hit on the same idea: establish a cooperative to lead the masses to common prosperity, while the village collective increased its collective income by contributing land as shares. At the end of 2015, with strong support from the city and subdistrict levels, Beisun Village, with Shandong Zehui Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. as the leader, joined with more than 140 households of villagers to register the "Zhangqiu City Zehui Planting Professional Cooperative." The cooperative successfully attracted 28 poor households with 47 people to participate in Salvia miltiorrhiza cultivation by contributing land as shares, further expanding the scale of cultivation and embarking on a path of industrialized and scaled development.

In order to enable the poor to gain more benefits from industrial development, the cooperative took the initiative to provide seedling subsidies and advance funds, enabling poor households to achieve "zero-cost" cultivation, and arranged cultivation insurance for the poor masses, with coverage of up to 1,000 yuan per mu, ensuring that poor households "reap a harvest whether there is drought or flood." In the production and sales stages, while providing free technical guidance, the cooperative signed Chinese medicinal herb purchase and sales agreements with all poor households and gave priority to purchasing under equal conditions. After Salvia miltiorrhiza entered the harvest period, the cooperative provided poor households free of charge with specialized machinery for digging Salvia miltiorrhiza in mountainous areas, improving labor efficiency.

On the basis of its original 320 mu of cultivation, the Zehui Planting Professional Cooperative further expanded its scale and has gradually developed into a Salvia miltiorrhiza cultivation base of 1,800 mu radiating to more than 10 surrounding villages, gradually forming a comprehensive industrial chain integrating the cultivation, processing and sales of Chinese medicinal herbs. Not only that, while achieving its own poverty alleviation and prosperity, Beisun Village also formed a pairing assistance relationship with Shibapan Village in Duozhuang, providing it with technical support and agricultural machinery, and purchasing more than 500 mu of Chinese medicinal herbs grown in that village, fundamentally solving the difficulty of selling Chinese medicinal herbs in villages in the southern mountainous area and further ensuring the sustained and stable development of the Chinese medicinal herb industry.

Sun Hui's successful entrepreneurship, in addition to his own efforts, was also inseparable from the strong support of Zhangqiu City. The city successively formulated and issued documents such as the "Implementing Opinions on Further Strengthening the Building of a High-level Talent Team" and the "Opinions on Implementing the Return of Outstanding Talents to Start Businesses and Strengthening the Building of Village-level Leadership Teams," focusing coordinated efforts on groups such as college students returning home, capable people who work or do business elsewhere, retired soldiers, and local young people skilled at becoming prosperous, and through 22 policies including project support, entrepreneurship training, financial services and temporary post training, encouraged and guided more outstanding Zhangqiu-native talents outside the area to return home to start businesses, continuously optimizing the county-level talent development ecosystem, accelerating the building of a "comprehensive experimental zone" for the development of mass entrepreneurship and innovation talent in the provincial capital, and comprehensively building a development momentum of talent returning, capital flowing back and entrepreneurship returning home.

As of now, the Zhangqiu City finance department allocates 5 million yuan in policy funds each year, newly supports 128 enterprises founded or established by returning entrepreneurial talents and various cooperatives, supports 69 returning entrepreneurial enterprises in achieving transformation from small to large and from weak to strong, recommends 11 entrepreneurial talents to serve in temporary posts as deputy secretaries of town and subdistrict Youth League working committees and assistants to village Party branch secretaries, plans to newly develop 15 Party members among entrepreneurial talents, and a group of outstanding talents who are young, understand management and have a head for becoming prosperous are becoming the backbone force leading urban and rural distinctive industries, driving the village collective economy and leading the masses to prosperity.