Why the valuable crab made him give up a million-yuan annual income

Zhuo Qihui's farm is right beside Xiaohai in Wanning. Xiaohai is an almost enclosed bay in the east of Wanning, and the Hele crab, hailed as one of Hainan's four famous dishes, grows here. The weather forecast said Typhoon "Caihong", a category 12 typhoon, might make landfall, so Zhuo Qihui hurried to the breeding base to check.

Reporter: What is this for?

Zhuo Qihui: It mainly stops the crabs from climbing up. Its surface is quite smooth, so when the crabs climb up they have nothing to grip, and then they slide back down.

Reporter: If a typhoon comes, can this hold it back?

Zhuo Qihui: If the wind is too strong, the whole thing gets blown down, and the crabs may escape.

What Zhuo Qihui farms is the Hele crab, unique to Wanning, and the market price is very high right now. Whenever it rains, the Hele crabs climb out. At the end of 2013, two straight days of torrential rain submerged Zhuo Qihui's base, and most of the crabs escaped with the water flow. Zhuo Qihui lost nearly 1 million yuan.

It was not until evening that Zhuo Qihui finished checking all the protective fences. Watching the sky gradually darken, he grew more and more nervous.

Zhuo Qihui: The whole cloud mass is moving very fast. This is very typical typhoon weather. It is gathering energy, and the destructive force it releases will be considerable. The weather forecast is not 100 percent certain either. As long as it has not made landfall, you cannot relax completely. You still have to be very tense, and there is still a lot of pressure inside.

It was very late at night, and Zhuo Qihui did not dare to sleep. He kept watching the typhoon's movements. Information from the Central Meteorological Observatory showed that the central wind force of Typhoon "Caihong" had risen to category 14.

Zhuo Qihui: See, the waves are already starting to build outside, the wind is raging, and now it is starting to crash up here. In 2013, the typhoon's impact was actually very limited. It was mainly the massive rainfall the typhoon brought, several days of continuous torrential rain. With too much rain, there was no way to drain it all at once, and the whole base was flooded. When we got to the pond, when we reached the road junction and looked over toward the pond, we could no longer see what the pond looked like. It was just like the sea, a vast expanse of white.

The lesson of 2013 still made Zhuo Qihui shudder. Early the next morning, the typhoon still had not made landfall. Zhuo Qihui hurried to the base, picked up a basket and continued patrolling the ponds. In the grass by the pond he found some Hele crabs trying to escape.

Reporter: Is it because of the typhoon?

Zhuo Qihui: Yes, it is because of the typhoon. As soon as the weather changes, some crabs try to escape.

Zhuo Qihui told the reporter that for every one of these crabs that escaped, he would lose more than 100 yuan.

Typhoon "Caihong" eventually brushed past Hainan, and Zhuo Qihui finally breathed a sigh of relief. But then he did something else that left the reporter very puzzled.

That afternoon, Zhuo Qihui and several partners came to the shore of Xiaohai, carrying a basket of large crabs and a box of crab seedlings. Such expensive Hele crabs, yet Zhuo Qihui was going to release them all into the sea.

Reporter: Is it that you cannot sell the crabs and you are afraid they will die?

Zhuo Qihui: The Hele crab has always had very good sales.

Reporter: Then how much is this basket of crabs worth?

Zhuo Qihui: Conservatively, 2,000 yuan, and the small crab seedlings are about 2,000 yuan too. The seedlings we release each year are worth about 40,000 to 50,000 yuan.

Why would Zhuo Qihui release Hele crabs that sell well and fetch a high price? Many local farmers did not understand these actions either.

Farmer: If you put the crab seedlings into Xiaohai, you cannot catch them in Xiaohai either. Even if you catch them, they are someone else's, not yours. I find it very strange.

But Zhuo Qihui told the reporter that this had a lot to do with his own entrepreneurial venture. So what was going on?

One day in July 2012, Zhuo Qihui and several young people contracted 40 mu of ponds by the shore of Xiaohai, preparing to do something the locals had always wanted to do but had never succeeded at: artificially farming Hele crabs. When local farmers heard that Zhuo Qihui was preparing to farm Hele crabs, they were both doubtful and full of expectation.

Zhou Yi: Based on the practices here and the environment here, I think they cannot succeed.

Zhuo Xiaojing: They will definitely fail. I have raised them before too, only not like them, specifically to farm them.

Su Zhulan: If they succeed, I will farm them together with him.

Reporter: You mean he can succeed?

Su Zhulan: Yes.

Villager: I hope they succeed. Young people who have come back from university should be allowed to succeed. If he succeeds, he will come here to guide us, teach us how to farm, and help us.

The Hele crab is a type of mud crab, produced only in Wanning, Hainan Province. It is one of Hainan's four famous dishes, and its market price has always remained high.

However, Hele crabs mainly come from wild capture. Although the price is high, few locals farm them.

Zhou Yi: People have thought about it before, and some have tried, but they all failed, and no one knows why.

Villager: We have all farmed them, and the yields were all low, so farming them is not worthwhile.

Section Chief Li of the Ocean Bureau: The price is good, but because of the impact on per-unit yield, the profit margin for farmers is relatively small and limited. So under these circumstances, the farmers' enthusiasm for farming Hele crabs has been greatly affected.

It turned out that many local farmers had farmed Hele crabs, but after spending money to release many crab seedlings, the yield per mu was only a few dozen jin. Gradually, people no longer dared to keep farming them. Why did Zhuo Qihui insist on doing something that so many people did not dare to do anymore?

Zhuo Qihui is from Wuchang Village, Wancheng Town, Wanning. In 2007 he went to Beijing for university. At a classmate gathering, Zhuo Qihui proudly introduced his hometown's Hele crab to his classmates. During the 2009 winter vacation, he returned to Hainan and planned to bring some Hele crabs to give to his classmates. Yet when Zhuo Qihui asked fishermen all along the shore of Xiaohai, he discovered a terrible fact: there were already very, very few Hele crabs in Xiaohai.

Zhuo Qihui: They are going extinct. As one of the four famous dishes, it is like the rice we eat every day. If you were told that one day rice was going to go extinct, you would think it was a terrible thing.

Zhuo Qihui was very optimistic about the market prospects of the Hele crab. He felt he could do something, so he gathered several high school classmates to discuss everyone farming Hele crabs together after graduation.

But to farm Hele crabs, Zhuo Qihui and his friends could be said to have no experience at all.

Zhuo Qihui: It seems that no one in this place has ever succeeded in farming them on such a large scale, so I will give it a try and see whether I can raise them.