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Nanjie fights against all odds for a cause

By Hu Yinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-18 08:45

Farmers work on the land for a living, but Zhao Minsheng does so more or less for fun. He doesn't work for himself, and has no fixed land to work on or fall back upon. Despite that he has a steady monthly income of 400 yuan ($59).

The 60-year-old leads a team of 22 co-workers in Nanjie, a village in the heart of Henan province. Agricultural output has soared in this village of re-collectivized farmland, though the 22 villagers, mostly men whose average age is 55, work on 600 mu (40 hectares) of land with just a pair each of corn and wheat harvesting equipment. They grow 900 kg of crop per mu and make 800,000 yuan a year. The farmers call themselves "farm workers" and work the land as a collective.

Children play a game called "bull fighting" in Nanjie Kindergarten. [China Daily]

The rest of the residents work in the village's 26 firms, mostly making and selling instant noodles, flour, spices, chocolate, beer, liquor and medicine. All of them give the income to the village and get free housing, healthcare, education, water, electricity and heating in return.

All this makes the villagers proud, for they have "solved the problems still plaguing other villages", such as farmers' fear of lax supervision. While other villages debate how to apply the central government's new policy that encourages land-use transfer for collective farming and agricultural mechanization, Nanjie sits pretty with its successful experiment.

"Collective economy is the inevitable path and the basis to solving sannong problems (farmers, villages and agriculture)," says Nanjie's Party chief Wang Hongbin.

Nanjie is different from other villages. It wakes up to the tune of The East is Red at 6:15 am, greets its workers with Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman around noon and sends them home with Socialism is Good playing on the broadcast station at 5 pm. A 6-m-tall statue of Chairman Mao Zedong lords over the village center, flanked by portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, with local militia being on sentry duty round the clock.

But the village embodies much more than utopian nostalgia. Thirty years into reforms, and at a time of crippling free market and rising number of rural cooperatives, Nanjie remains a leading name among the 7,000 to 10,000 Chinese villages that have held onto or readapted the collective model.

Quite a few villages in Henan have copied Nanjie's model. Even leaders from Anhui province's Xiaogang village, the "birthplace of China's reform", have visited Nanjie and left words of appreciation and admiration in its museum guest book. This is what Xiaogang Party chief Shen Hao has written: "(We will) learn from Nanjie, strengthen the collective economy and proceed toward common prosperity."

Nanjie is home to and provides free housing, healthcare and education to about 3,200 residents and more than 3,000 migrant workers who have been given "honorary resident" status.

Liu Gaimin's story mirrors most of her kind in the village. The 67-year-old was married into a Nanjie family in 1962, and suffered decades of hardship. She even regretted marrying there. "There was no decent thing to eat no decent water to drink and no decent place to live a heavy shower outside meant a little one inside the house," she recalls.

Nanjie dismantled its communes, as did the rest of rural China, in 1983. It came under the household responsibility system, and set up two factories. But it wasn't long before the firms declared bankruptcy, and their bosses fled with the villagers' money.

Children leave the Nanjie primary school. [China Daily]

That's when the turning point for Nanjie came about. The village committee took over the companies' assets in 1984. Two years later, it asked people who could not use their allocated farmland to give them to the village collective so that others could work on it. Liu's family, who had one-third hectare of land, was among the first to do so. Others followed gradually. By 1990, the collective had received all of the village's 67 hectares of farmland. The village has rented out 27 hectares to neighboring villages.

With the companies' assets and other property returned to the community, Nanjie began offering welfare to its residents. It started with free water and electricity, then came coal, natural gas, meat, eggs and flour, and finally education. By the early 1990s, the village had a complete welfare system, paying even agricultural taxes and medical expenses as a collective.

Work to build apartment buildings began in 1991. Liu moved into a three-bedroom apartment two years later, and worked in a factory till 2004. "I'm just an ordinary farmer. I'll be grateful all my life to the village cadre who have helped us get where we are now ... this happy life of ours didn't come easy," she says.

Like all Nanjie villagers, Liu is entitled to 15 kg of flour and 60 yuan of welfare tickets a month. Though she doesn't work any more, she still earns 200-300 yuan a month for hosting field experience programs every day for the village tourism company.

People began visiting Nanjie in the 1990s, but it wasn't until 2004 that the village leadership started a tourism company, charging visitors for random visits to houses and sightseeing tours. That was also the worst year for village economy.

Almost every employee in the company is from outside the village. Ni Yandi, 22, from Linying county, is one of them. Long been attracted to Nanjie (the village is part of her county), she applied to work for the village after graduating from high school in 2004. The village has not only given her a job, but also allotted her a dormitory.

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