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2 How a village went from
rags to Rolls-Royces By Pallavi
Aiyar
HUAXI, China - Row after row of
two-story mansions, with shingled roofs, stucco
walls and the occasional mock-Tudor turret. A
picture-perfect slice of American suburbia, except
only a few meters to the south of this idyll, the
smokestacks of steelworks belch out black vaporous
clouds.
This is the quixotic world of what
is officially China's richest village, Huaxi - a
community whose enterprises collectively earned 40
billion yuan (US$5 billion) in sales last year.
Every one
of
Huaxi's 400 families lives in a 600-square-meter
home, owns at least two cars and has assets worth
a million yuan. The average per capita income of
the 2,000 villagers is $10,000 a year, almost 50
times that of the average Chinese
farmer.
It's clear that Huaxi folk are no
ordinary peasants. They are in fact successful
industrialists who trade with countries across the
world from India to Spain and who own factories in
places as far-flung as Vietnam and Mexico. But to
add to the already complex plot, Huaxi villagers
are no ordinary industrialists, either.
All the land in Huaxi, which is in China's
eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, is communally
owned and the majority of the needs of the
villagers are communally met. In a throwback to
the Maoist heyday in China, they are provided with
free health care and education by the village
commune itself, in addition to pensions and an
allowance of some 3,000 yuan a year for food.
In short, Huaxi defies categorization -
and the village has been mixing ideological
cocktails for over 40 years, sometimes in open
defiance of the prevailing political climate in
the country.
At the helm the village is
the 80-year-old former party secretary Wu Renbao,
who is credited with more or less single-handedly
having steered Huaxi's people out of rags and into
Rolls-Royces. Once reviled as a capitalist-roader
for his pro-business leanings, today Wu is hailed
by China's authorities as a model worker, and
Huaxi is upheld as an example of what Beijing
means by its recent vow to build a "new socialist
countryside".
Wu, who was the village's
Communist Party secretary from its founding in
1961 until 2003, is a uniquely entrepreneurial
bureaucrat. During the Cultural Revolution
(1966-77), a time when "money" was a dirty word,
he disregarded the established orthodoxy and
started up a machine-parts factory, allowing Huaxi
to make enough money to escape the worst
depravations of the period.
He cackles in
pure glee when he recalls what he terms his
"secret factory" and how whenever county officials
came to visit the village, he would quickly send
away the workers to till the fields, bringing them
back to the factory once the officials had left.
The factory had purpose-built high walls and a
single, unimposing entrance, Wu explains, and it
was thus able to avoid detection.
After
China embarked on its economic reforms, Wu once
again bucked the nationwide trend and, instead of
dividing up village land and handing it over to
individual households for farming, he decided to
keep the land communal. His focus, however, was
away from agriculture and toward developing
industry.
"I have always been a good
communist," says Wu, "because I have always served
the people and tried to make everyone happy and
rich." He adds, "I believe in practice, not
theory, and in learning what's best for my village
from facts rather than theoretical formulations."
Wu's manner is folksy and his gentle smile
reveals worn-down, stained teeth. Dressed in
simple peasant garb, at odds with the flashy
surroundings of the gleaming pagoda-style hotel in
which the interview takes place, he has an
avuncular look suited to his village nickname of
"Lao Shu Shu" or senior uncle.
But over
the years several Chinese commentators have
pointed out that Wu's disarming charm hides a
canny and even ruthless politician who is probably
better connected than his rustic appearance
reveals. Indeed, despite repeatedly flouting
central party directives, Wu never lost his job
and Huaxi's enterprises were able to grow quickly
and strongly through the 1980s, even as private
enterprises in other parts of the country
struggled to get access to credit.
When
asked to explain how he was able to retain his
position through the ups and downs of China's
recent history, Wu is
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