A small village’s success story Walking into Tengtou Village, it is hard to associate it with the traditional image of China’s countryside: poor, dirty and backward. It is nothing like that, but rather, presents a clean, beautiful picture, making you feel as if you are entering a garden. Everywhere you can see trees and flowers. The villagers here live in houses arranged in neat rows. Tourists are busy visiting this featured ecological showplace.
Tengtou, in Fenghua City, east China’s Zhejiang Province, currently has only 311 households with 791 people. In the past, it was a very poor village without a decent road, and its agricultural production was too little to feed its residents. There was a saying among people in the area: if you have a daughter, never marry her to someone from impoverished Tengtou.
However, after years of development Tengtou has entirely changed the situation, and what makes villagers proud is that through their own efforts, they have turned Tengtou into one of the leading villages in China in terms of economic aggregate and living standards.
Fu Qiping, a local official, said the village has set development goals for this year of achieving total agricultural and industrial output of 2.3 billion yuan and tax payments of 230-250 million yuan. Last year, the average per-capita annual income of residents in Zhejiang’s Ningbo City, one of the richest areas in China, was about 18,000 yuan, and Tengtou villagers earned 15,300 yuan each.
But what should be noticed is the large difference in living expenses between Ningbo and Tengtou. In fact, villagers in Tengtou spend much less than Ningbo residents. For example, the price of an apartment with a floor space of 100 square meters may top 550,000 yuan in downtown Ningbo. By comparison, a two-story house in Tengtou only costs 80,000 to 100,000 yuan. Daily necessities also are cheaper. Thus, the level of income ensures that Tengtou villagers enjoy a quite comfortable life.
Fu said that over the 40 years of development of Tengtou, the spirit of hard work has always been a driving force pushing it forward, and it has gone through three phases of development. Beginning in the 1960s, Tengtou improved the farmland and raised the crop output to feed its residents. From the mid-1980s, it attached importance to improving farmers’ agricultural techniques and established a multitude of factories so that the local economy developed apace, and a large proportion of the workforce was transferred to industrial and tertiary sectors. Since the 1990s, besides further developing its industry, Tengtou has focused on exploring a new type of ecological tourism, which proved to be quite successful.
Entering the 21st century, Tengtou cooperated with Japan’s Yamatonoen Corp. to set up a seed and seedling company, while working with Zhejiang University and the Agricultural Academy of Zhejiang Province to launch a plant tissue cultivation center.
Presently, virtually no farmers plant crops in Tengtou, but they sell these high-end agricultural products. Hi-tech agriculture has been the direction the village is pursuing. South Africa’s Mandrake City has twice sent agrotechnicians for training and study in Tengtou.
The secondary industry has been a powerful engine to propel Tengtou’s economy. The village now has more than 60 companies in various industries, creating an output of 1.26 billion yuan in 2005. The non-agricultural sector is anchored by the clothing industry, supplemented by paper packaging exports, “green” food processing and bamboo artworks. Its most successful clothing company, Aiyimei, after 20 years of development, has become the largest production base in China of cashmere wear for export.
Yet, ecological tourism is what distinguishes Tengtou. As it enjoys a favorable climate and environment for growing crops, the village has developed an ornamental plant industry, primarily in greenhouses. These plants are not sold on a wholesale basis, but only on a small scale to tourists.
Actually, ecological tourism has taken up most of the cultivable land in Tengtou, so the village rents some land from neighboring communities for other types of agriculture. Wu Yafen, Director of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Fenghua Municipal Government, said that if the village had enough land, it would consider planting more high-quality fruit for sale.
The success of Tengtou village is not only seen in its much improved economy and people’s living standards, but in its healthy economic structure, which ensures further sound development.
In July 2005, before the formal proposal by the Central Government to build a “new countryside,” Wu Guanzheng, a standing committee member of the policy-making Political Bureau of the ruling Communist Party of China, inspected Tengtou. He said, “I see good economic development, a beautiful environment, people’s happy lives and a harmonious village here. It’s really a model of a modern new socialist countryside.”