How Is Rural Construction Carried Out? An Experiment by a Young Volunteer Teacher
Qinglong Manchu Autonomous County lies at the northeastern tip of Hebei Province and is administratively under the jurisdiction of Qinhuangdao City. Because industry and commerce are underdeveloped, Qinglong generally relies mainly on agricultural income. Mazhangzi Village is located in Qinglong County; walking south for about 40 minutes brings you to the foot of the mountain. At present, after deducting the roughly 500 people who have left to work elsewhere, the village has about 1,200 permanent residents, who mainly depend on Chinese chestnuts (Castanea mollissima) as their major source of income while also growing temperate fruit trees to make a living.
According to the village elders, Qinglong has belonged to the region beyond the Shanhaiguan Pass since the Ming and Qing dynasties. The place name Mazhangzi comes from the fact that this area was part of the Bordered White Banner's fief during the Qing dynasty, when the standard for delimiting boundaries was horse-racing enclosure, and Mazhangzi became the village name. The ancestors of Mazhangzi came from the Northeast, and earlier still may have been Han Chinese from Shandong. After fleeing famine to the Northeast and living among the Manchu, they followed the Eight Banners south again at the end of the Ming dynasty and settled in Mazhangzi, garrisoning the area north of the Great Wall.
Mazhangzi Elementary School was originally slated for consolidation, but with the coordination and funding support of "China Zigen," the school was preserved. Through coordination by "China Zigen," the volunteer-teaching organization "Teach For China (TFC)" provided volunteer teachers to supplement the shortage of teaching manpower. Lan Yi, a young man from Guangxi, came to Mazhangzi Elementary School in 2011 as a volunteer teacher.
"To improve children's learning conditions, you must also improve rural family life!!"
Qinglong's chestnuts are of excellent quality and were originally mostly exported to Japan. This year, because of strained China-Japan relations and wholesalers' doubts about the quality of some chestnuts, a large quantity of Qinglong's chestnuts went unsold.
Through online channels, Lan Yi found some merchants in Beijing who buy chestnuts. At four o'clock in the morning on September 3, 2013, before dawn, Lan Yi and five villagers drove from Qinglong County to Beijing, planning to visit several large chestnut-buying firms and organic markets.
(Campus life at Mazhangzi Elementary School. Photo / Lin Jiyang)
[Further Reading]
The Most Beautiful Rural Scenery - TFC 2011 Cohort Volunteer Teachers' Study Trip
Beautiful Rural Education Selection: Mazhangzi Village Elementary School, Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province