The Breeding Story of Partridge Prince Ding Huadong

His fame rose across the land and throughout the country; he is a young man born in the 1980s, yet despite his considerable wealth he still busies himself in the breeding workshop just like any worker. He was the first precedent to transition a farmers' professional cooperative from a family business to a joint-stock enterprise, and to distribute shares to the breeding workers. He was also the first to comprehensively promote the credit economy nationwide, that is, supporting operations through credit sales, which caused an enormous response and was widely imitated across the country. In just three years he created a breeding industry legend that went from 30,000 to 30 million, and his story of breeding rare birds was reported by multiple media outlets nationwide, earning him more than ten honors including "National New Rural Wealth-Building Leader." "Give me a fulcrum, and I will move the whole world." This is the introverted yet forward-thinking Ding Huadong, who has created numerous "firsts" in China's specialty breeding industry. Ding Huadong has said: "Our partridge breeding industry has only just started; the goal is always to keep growing stronger and to keep creating the next first." Ding Huadong - manager of the Shandong Shanxian Dayang Biotechnology Group, manager of the Rare Bird King Partridge Hot Pot chain stores, manager of the Game Food Poultry and Egg Supermarket chain stores, and sales manager of the Huadong Poultry Dayang Partridge Professional Cooperative - is described differently in different people's eyes.

His parents and family say: he is a utopian dreamer. Yet he turned his fantasies into ideals and passionate practice, creating one wealth myth after another, one entrepreneurial legend after another. Friends and acquaintances say: he is a go-getter who dares to think and dare to act. He does what he says, succeeding or dying in the attempt, risking persistence and specialty breeding, winning his career, winning wealth, and becoming an outstanding figure among his peers. Farmer friends say: he is a remarkable young man. A farmer's son, Ding Huadong, through his specialty breeding industry, changed the fate of millions of farmers and rapidly fulfilled their long-cherished wish of escaping poverty and achieving prosperity. Franchisees say: it is good to cool off in the shade of a big tree, and the fragrance stays on the hand that gives the rose. Over three years he led his chukar partridge specialty breeding army sweeping across the length and breadth of China, spreading like a prairie fire and rapidly connecting the whole land. Outsiders say: he is a madman, he always turns the impossible into the possible. In three years, he turned a partridge breeding industry that had been buried for 10 years into a grand cycle, and turned an immature market into an entrepreneurial opportunity. Success and failure became a scenery in his life, yet what is not widely known is that he was once a wanderer who had left his hometown, who could not even find a job, and who hovered on the edge of the city like a slave of the city.

A Farmer's Child, A Bitter Childhood

In the 1980s an old man drew a circle in the South China Sea, and from then on China's reform and opening-up began, but Shandong's Shanxian County, not inside the circle, remained poor. In the spring of 1980, Ding Huadong was born in Ding Xinzhuang, a poor little village in Litianlou Town, Shanxian County, Shandong. His mother was a farmer, his father a civilian teacher; as the eldest son, he had two younger brothers and two younger sisters below him. Because there were too many siblings and the family was poor, his parents never brought themselves to eat a single bite of the well-prepared food, and his two younger brothers and sisters always wore his hand-me-down patched old clothes. In order to let his younger brothers and sisters dress a little better, he often asked his parents to add new clothes for himself. Yet how could he know that in an era when even food and warmth were a problem, this was harder for a family with five children than reaching the sky. He often saw his mother shed helpless tears over this; that year he was 8 years old.

A poor man's child takes charge early; to lighten his parents' toil, the sensible boy often took his younger brothers and sisters to pick up wheat ears in the fields in summer, and in winter to collect bottles used for spraying crops with medicine to exchange for money, to ease the burden on the whole family.

In the year he was 10, because of the whole family's hardship, his father had to resign from his teaching job, pack his bags and join that wave of plunging into business from 20 years earlier. With his father gone for two and a half years, the burden of the family fell on his mother alone; more than ten mu of land relied on his mother to work alone, his eldest younger sister dropped out of school to look after the youngest sister, and gradually his younger brother also dropped out, so that only he could be supported in his studies. At that time he often saw in his dreams that the great stage of life was opening up to his father, and that the Avenue of Stars was stretching far, far ahead for his father. Life is like this: only a life woven of pain and longing can have hope.

Two and a half years later his father returned. Farmers who rely only on toiling over the land with their faces to the soil and their backs to the sky can never escape that swamp and whirlpool. Risk-taking and entrepreneurship let his father realize the most glorious moment of his life, changed the whole family, even changed the whole village, and led the villagers onto the road to prosperity with new concepts and ideas.

A Newborn Calf, The Failure of Entrepreneurship

Life cannot depend on others, and equally cannot depend entirely on one's parents. Born just in time for the clarion call of reform and opening-up, and graduating just in time for an era with no more iron rice bowl, at 19 he was awakened by the 1998 torrent and plunged into the university of society. He did not, like most people, find a stable and secure job after graduation; instead, carrying hope and dreams, he chose entrepreneurship, to catch up with the pace of China's economic development.

In 1999, at only 19 years old, Ding Huadong brought 5,000 yuan borrowed from his father and aunt to Xinxiang, Henan. After investigating the development zone, he found the solar energy market was a blank, so he rented two rooms and started a solar energy installation business. Thanks to its geographical advantage, the solar energy business was exceptionally booming, with people coming every day to look and buy. But the good times did not last; a year later, eight solar energy specialty stores sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain on that street, and one bowl of rice was divided into nine portions. The entry of large capital and large-scale operations meant that in the second year his business could no longer sustain normal expenses and living, and the money earned in the first year was lost again. At the end of 2000, Ding Huadong ended the solar energy business, packed his bags and boarded the train home. Just after the Spring Festival, he received an invitation call from a technical secondary school classmate calling from Datong, Shanxi: "I'm doing very well in the clothing business in Datong, come over, let's do it together." Yet after arriving in Datong, the colleague and friend did not take him into a clothing market, but into a large lecture hall like a church. The hall was full of people, and the mythical stories of entrepreneurial wealth and thunderous applause finally woke him up; he understood that he had walked into a black den of pyramid schemes. Many people had put in the hard-earned money their parents had accumulated over many years; every day they slept on heated brick beds, ate boiled cabbage, were dizzy from pyramid schemes, and became tools of speculation.

Ding Huadong was not dizzied, nor did he complain. He borrowed 3,680 yuan from his younger sister who was working in Beijing, handed it over, and quickly found a chance to escape the pyramid scheme den, leaving Datong, Shanxi without even taking his luggage, leaving that place where hope and dreams had been shattered.

Gray Memories, The Life of a Migrant Worker

After the blows of two failures, Ding Huadong had no life goal of his own, and did not know which direction he should develop in the future; he only knew that what he most needed at that moment was a job that could feed him, so that he would not end up on the streets. Even if he ended up on the streets, he no longer wanted to ask his family for a single cent, and no longer wanted to beg from his own relatives and friends. So going out every day to look for work became his job, and finally at a restaurant in Shijingshan District, Beijing, he found a waiter's job; his daily work was carrying plates and bowls to guests, mopping floors, including cleaning toilets. Yet what half a year of hard work brought was the hotel owner fleeing, and the wages of dozens of people were left with no source. The Spring Festival was about to arrive, and he did not even have the travel fare to go home, let alone send some New Year money to his parents. Beijing's tall buildings and bright lights had no place for him; without a diploma, without skills, without connections, the only thing he could do was the bitter and tiring work at the very bottom of society. Afterward he also worked as a security guard and a courier... the degree of hardship can well be imagined. Ding Huadong deeply realized that drifting and wandering in a foreign land could not change himself, nor could it change his family.