Tuanjie New Village in Hotan City is full of fighting spirit, working together with one heart to pursue unity
Zhu Derong is teaching villagers greenhouse vegetable planting experience.
Zhu Derong is a typical "second-generation Xinjiang native," speaking fluent Uyghur. He has farmed land, sold vegetables, worked as an agricultural technician, and served as a township cadre... In 2014, Zhu Derong stood out from more than a dozen candidates from **7 townships in Hotan City and was directly appointed by the Organization Department of the Hotan Municipal Party Committee as Party branch secretary of Tuanjie New Village in Hotan City (hereinafter referred to as Tuanjie New Village).
Facing the trust and heavy responsibility placed on him by the organization, Zhu Derong demonstrated unprecedented leadership. During the interview, the sentence the reporter heard him say most often was, "As long as I live one day, I must strive one day." He said he hoped Tuanjie New Village could develop a new culture of courage to strive and positive upward momentum.
Over the past two years, Zhu Derong has turned this beautiful vision into practical action, leading the whole village's villagers to strive with determination and forge ahead actively, not only enabling Tuanjie New Village to achieve tremendous development in modern large-scale agriculture and new rural construction, but also making all the village's work a banner for Hotan City and even the Hotan region.
Striving to escape poverty
Heading east from Hotan's urban area, after crossing the Yurungkash River Bridge and going all the way north, one quickly enters the Taklamakan Desert, where Tuanjie New Village is located.
At noon on March 23, the reporter arrived at Tuanjie New Village.
Upon entering the village, the newly greening shelterbelt blocked the vast Gobi outside the village. On the newly built asphalt road, agricultural vehicles and large trucks loaded with cucumbers and tomatoes passed through from time to time. Newly built houses stood on both sides of the road, and the sound of construction could be heard from time to time. The entire village presented a prosperous scene of production and life.
The Tuanjie New Village committee office is a 3-story building completed in October 2014. Standing on the roof and looking out, everything before one's eyes was unbelievable - two adjacent plots of land, one covered by thick yellow sand with no breath of life at all; the other filled with modern vegetable greenhouses, which under the sunlight looked like layer upon layer of white waves.
From longing to leave the countryside in his youth to, after becoming village Party secretary, thinking every day about how to let the villagers live a richer material and spiritual life - walking along the village lanes, Zhu Derong was filled with emotion.
In 1958, Zhu Derong's parents came to **. Born in 1966, he told the reporter that farmers' lives had never been as good as they are now. "When I was little, the village had no roads and produced no grain. Every household worried about filling their stomachs." Zhu Derong said his family had 3 siblings. The adobe house they lived in when they were young was not even as big as the villagers' sheep pens now; a pair of trousers bought for 5 yuan could be worn through 3 Spring Festivals; because the family was poor, the siblings slept under one cotton quilt, and at night they often pulled at each other, so the middle of the cotton quilt would easily tear into a hole, and the siblings got beaten plenty of times because of it.
From that time on, Zhu Derong's greatest wish was to strive hard to escape poverty.
"Today's farmers have it too easy." Zhu Derong said that the construction plan of Tuanjie New Village fully respected farmers' rural living habits, considering not only what would benefit their production and make their lives convenient, but also what would support their entrepreneurship and development. In September 2014, after nearly 7 months of intense construction, the first batch of 212 households received the keys to their new homes in Tuanjie New Village. The quality of the houses was very good, and the layouts kept pace with urban trends. At the same time, each household also received two vegetable greenhouses. As soon as the villagers moved in, they began winter vegetable planting.
Zhu Derong clearly remembered that on August 30, 2014, 10 minutes after the houses were allocated, the village welcomed a moment of celebration. Many villagers began setting off firecrackers, and the "crackling" echoed throughout the village, as lively as the Spring Festival.
This day was not any holiday, yet the village was as lively as if it were a festival. Some post-80s and post-90s land-lost farmers from 7 townships in Hotan City welcomed a superior platform for entrepreneurship and development. The originally drab village was adorned with bright colors on this day, and many Uyghur villagers put on beautiful clothes and danced.
Despite having rich grassroots work experience, only at this moment did Zhu Derong discover that compared with the past, not only was life here different, but even the work "was not quite what he had originally imagined."
"For example, handling disputes sounds like a very small matter, but actually doing it is not simple." Zhu Derong said, "Here, it is more like creative work."
Tuanjie New Village itself is an active exploration of an embedded community. The main content of work here is to explore how to play a role in promoting ethnic interaction, exchange and integration, and jointly promoting harmony. More importantly, through the form of mixed living among residents of all ethnic groups, it can realize the passing on of planting and breeding techniques, and enhance mutual understanding and mutual trust.
Since formally taking office on August 16, 2014, in nearly two years, Zhu Derong lost 7 kilograms and slept at most five or six hours a day. As soon as he lay down, his mind was full of village affairs. Although he took pride in this, when asked whether he was tired, he still sincerely admitted: "Tired! Especially tired!"
According to Zhu Derong's recollection, when he first entered the village, although he had also been allocated a house, he could not free up time to decorate it, so he slept on a concrete floor for 4 months and ate instant noodles for two months.
"At that time, the village had no cameras installed either. We even slept on the roof of the village committee building for 5 months. If anything happened at any household, or if any household's dog barked, it could all be observed from the roof. Even small matters like who drank and fought or who ate without paying were right under our eyes. Thinking about it now, it was quite interesting." Zhu Derong said with a smile, "It was just that every morning when we got up, we looked like mud monkeys."
"Risk a lifetime, just do two things" - this was Zhu Derong's greatest life goal after taking office.
Tuanjie New Village relocated a total of 534 households of villagers in two batches, with ethnic minorities and Han Chinese each accounting for exactly half. Each household had two vegetable greenhouses on average. Over the past two years, Zhu Derong devoted himself wholeheartedly to leading villagers out of poverty and toward prosperity and maintaining village social stability as the entire focus of his work. Whenever he had time, he walked around the village to learn about the villagers' greenhouse vegetable planting. Every half month, he also regularly held meetings to tell villagers what vegetables to plant at what time, what temperature in degrees Celsius to control, and what the key technical points of greenhouse vegetable planting were.
The day before the reporter interviewed him, a villager had come to find him. This villager said that the greenhouse vegetables he had planted still had not set fruit after 3 months, and the village's agricultural technician told him to pull them all up.
When Zhu Derong heard this, he became anxious on the spot. He told the villager that he absolutely must not pull them up, because if he did, the hard work of the previous 3 months would be wasted! He asked the villager to bring him the seed packaging bag. Only upon looking did he discover that because the villager was illiterate, he had mistakenly bought open-field seeds instead of greenhouse seeds.
So Zhu Derong personally went to this villager's home. After inspecting the growth of the vegetables, he told the villager that in the coming days, half of the greenhouse's insulating blanket should be left uncovered and half covered, so the vegetables could gradually adapt to the greenhouse temperature. After Qingming Festival, the plastic film should be completely removed, and the vegetables would soon bear fruit.
Zhu Derong said that starting from his teens, he began farming, and now there is no vegetable he cannot grow, and no difficult problem he cannot handle. For this reason as well, Zhu Derong almost never refused others' requests. "He is a nice old fellow, very kind-hearted." said his wife Qin Lanfang.