Wang Aijun returned to his hometown to start a business, leading his fellow villagers to prosperity close to home

In Wang Aijun's memory of Chanfang Village, Sunjiazhuang Town, Yu County, the scenes of his parents scrimping and saving, and going around borrowing from villagers to scrape together school fees, remain vivid to this day.

As the saying goes, the children of the poor take charge early. Everything his family had done, and the help from his fellow villagers, Wang Aijun kept firmly in mind. When he graduated from high school, at the age of 20, he gave up the chance to take the college entrance exam and decided to shoulder the family burden together with his parents. He resolutely packed up his things and went to another place to begin a life as a migrant worker, taking a job as a labourer.

After several years of hard work, Wang Aijun had saved up a little money. He set his sights on the automobile transport trade, put all his savings into it, and later gathered the idle young labourers of his own village to set up a construction company, contracting engineering projects here and there. From working for others to leading his fellow villagers in starting businesses, what Wang Aijun brought them was not only higher incomes, but also that drive to dare to think and dare to act.

In 2007, Wang Aijun discovered that the vegetable market in Yu County was unable to meet demand, so he came up with the idea of using his village's land resources to develop protected vegetable cultivation. He had originally been doing very well, and to suddenly change trades made his family strongly opposed to the idea.

At the time Wang Aijun was 32 years old, with nearly 600,000 yuan in savings. He knew that his family's unanimous opposition came from the fear that the savings they had painstakingly built up over many years would be washed away.

Wang Aijun knew what the risk meant for him, but he saw even more clearly the hope: "If this works out, the villagers can increase their incomes and get rich right at their doorstep."

After a year of market research, Wang Aijun's confidence in his venture grew even firmer. Together with 5 households from his village, he established the Yu County Xinsheng Planting Professional Cooperative, and through land transfer contracted 50 mu of land in the village. With an investment of 1.05 million yuan, he built 20 mu of high-standard, wide-span solar greenhouses, all of which went into production by the end of October 2008. Early the following year, the first batch of protected vegetables they grew came smoothly onto the market.

At the end of July 2009, 200,000 kg of vegetables grown by the cooperative came onto the market, with sales revenue reaching 450,000 yuan and net income of 200,000 yuan, while also providing work for 15 idle labourers from the village. At that year's villagers' meeting, Wang Aijun proposed expanding the scale of the greenhouses, and the cooperative members unanimously agreed. They then transferred another 150 mu of land in the neighbouring Shihuiping Village. By the end of September, the newly added 80 mu of solar greenhouses had also been completed.

Just as Wang Aijun and his fellow villagers were preparing to go all out, the vegetable greenhouses were hit by a once-in-a-century snowstorm. The greenhouses all collapsed overnight, the seedlings of 38 varieties including strawberries and watermelons introduced that year were frozen to death, and the cooperative's direct economic losses reached 5.8 million yuan.

Without waiting for the snow to stop, Wang Aijun led his employees in carrying out self-rescue. With the support and help of governments at all levels, most of the greenhouses were back in production in less than 2 months.

As early as the initial stage of greenhouse construction, Wang Aijun had obtained a 100,000 yuan start-up loan from the local rural credit cooperative. Once the cooperative began making a profit, Wang Aijun and his partners immediately paid off the loan and their debts. Thanks to their good credit record, Wang Aijun quickly secured another loan during the post-disaster greenhouse reconstruction.

The facilities needed for the reconstruction came from a manufacturer in Shandong, the very same equipment supplier as when the greenhouses were first built. They were deeply impressed by Wang Aijun, and not only sold him facilities such as automatic roller blinds and micro-sprinkler water-saving irrigation systems at preferential prices, but also exchanged with him new technologies in grafting cultivation and soil-testing formula fertilisation.

In August 2010, Wang Aijun restructured the cooperative into Shanxi Yishengyuan Agricultural Science and Technology Development Co., Ltd. The company operates according to a market-oriented model, with the farmers who had originally pooled their capital becoming shareholders and the cooperative's farmers becoming company employees. In 2011, he introduced the "Zhongyoutao No. 12 greenhouse nectarine cultivation technology" from the Zhengzhou Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The nectarine trees planted in 2012 bore fruit that same year. After several years of development, the company's annual income has reached around 2 million yuan.