Zhang Fuyou was basking in the sunlight at the brick-paved cultural plaza of Tangyue Village, enjoying a moment of quietness. The plaza, surrounded by Western villa-style houses, might be mistaken as one in a high-end urban neighborhood if not for the patches of corn and vegetable fields in front of some of the houses.

At the top of a hill overlooking the plaza, four gigantic Chinese characters written in red remind villagers that poverty breeds a desire for change. The characters embody Tangyue Village’s determination to shake off poverty.

The village, located in Anshun, Guizhou Province, has a long history. Local historical records show that it was founded by expeditionary soldiers dispatched by Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to quell rebellion in the area. Nowadays, villagers with the surnames Peng, Luo and Li are descendants of these soldiers. With a total population of 3,393, the village was mired in poverty until just three years ago.

Dramatic change took place in June 2014, after an unprecedented flood. “Floodwater came above my shoulders,” 53-year-old Zhang told Beijing Review. He said the flood toppled many houses in the village and ruined villagers’ belongings.

However, the flood triggered economic reform in the village, which has already lifted almost all locals out of poverty. Data provided by the provincial government show that in 2013, the villagers’ average annual per-capita net income was only about 70 percent of the provincial average, and 600 villagers in 138 households lived under the poverty line.

From 2013 to 2016, the average annual per-capita net income increased from less than 4,000 yuan ($613) to 10,030 yuan ($1,538). Now, the modern and vibrant village has become an example to be emulated by other villages.

Desire for change

As the village has changed, so has Zhang’s life. Two decades ago, he farmed half an acre of land for a living, but could barely make ends meet. “When I got married, I lived in a 20-square-meter stone house,” he recalled.

He and his wife now have an annual net income of 60,000 yuan ($9,199) and reside in a three-story villa. The couple has invested their farmland in the village cooperative, Golden Earth, and in return they are paid dividends and rent for the leased land. Zhang also works for the village cooperative planting various vegetables, and makes an annual salary of around 24,000 yuan ($3,680).

The rural cooperative was set up in 2015, Cao Youming, the village’s finance director, told Beijing Review. After the severe flood in 2014, the then-head of the village, Zuo Wenxue, led villagers in dealing with the disaster and reconstructing the village. Meanwhile, he also pondered the village’s future development path.

Before the flood, the village’s income mainly came from farmlands and forests, said Cao. Many villagers, especially the younger generation, became migrant workers in other places. Although residents had the resources to remain fed and clothed, they decided to carry out reforms in order to attain a better lifestyle.

Early in 2014, a three-pronged reform system was piloted in the city of Liupanshui, near Anshun and Tangyue Village. The goal of the reform was to “transform resources into assets, funds into equities and farmers into stockholders.” Under this policy, farmers were encouraged to voluntarily invest their assets, money and skills in rural cooperatives in return for dividends and rent, and a salary if they also worked for the cooperatives.

Following the flood, Zhou Jiankun, Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Anshun Committee, inspected Tangyue and suggested that the village should also set up a cooperative. In July 2014, a rural comprehensive reform office was established in Tangyue to steer the three-pronged reform in the village, resulting in the launch of the Golden Earth rural cooperative in 2015.

The plan falls in line with China’s goal, set at the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020. It also follows the Central Government’s plans to deepen comprehensive reform.

By the end of 2014, China still had more than 70 million rural people living in poverty, said Liu Yongfu, Director of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development. More than 10 million people should be lifted out of poverty every year nationwide until 2020 through measures such as developing production systems, relocation, ecological compensation, education and social security initiatives, according to Liu.

In June 2015, President Xi Jinping visited Guizhou, stressing the need to make scientific plans to eliminate poverty by 2020.

By the end of 2015, 4.93 million people in Guizhou still lived in poverty, according to the provincial poverty alleviation office. In 2016, the three-pronged reform was introduced in 1,016 villages located in 21 counties, involving 482,000 poverty-stricken people. In that year, the province’s population of impoverished people was reduced by 1.208 million, or 24.5 percent. In the next three years, Guizhou plans to lift more than 1 million people out of poverty per year, which means that it will contribute to about one 10th of total poverty reduction at the national level.

After the rural cooperative was launched in Tangyue, more and more residents joined by transferring their land use rights to the cooperative. By the end of 2016, all land in the village had been put into the cooperative, according to the CPC Guizhou Provincial Committee’s Policy Research Office.

The cooperative hires locals as rural workers to cultivate farms and forests. The opportunity has lured back most of the 890 villagers who worked in other places as migrant workers.

The village has also set up a transportation fleet, a construction team and a workshop for women, which make use of the surplus labor in the village. An electronics plant is also under construction. Zhang Deqin, a woman in her 50s who operates a food stand by the village cultural plaza, told Beijing Review that her nephew has made more than 1 million yuan ($153,318) working in transportation and construction.

Now, the village is clean, beautiful and vibrant. Fruit trees such as plum and pomegranate cover the mountains surrounding the village, while a wide variety of vegetables and flowers flourish in the fields. Before the rural cooperative was set up, 30 percent of land in the village was fallow because so many people had left the village to work in other places. Now the fields are all cultivated.

Secret to success

Tangyue’s success story has been widely reported in the media. Wang Hongjia, a well-known writer, documented the change in a book, Tangyue’s Road, after conducting an in-depth, on-site study of the village.

The Policy Research Office of the CPC Guizhou Provincial Committee has analyzed Tangyue’s case and credited its success to the reform of the rural property system that now encourages the transfer of land use rights, profit sharing with farmers under a joint stock operation model and rural governance reform.

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, land in rural areas is collectively owned, and used to be collectively farmed by members of people’s communes. In the late 1970s, after reform and opening-up policies were introduced and people’s communes were abolished, land was contracted to individual farming households. This arrangement was believed to empower farmers, and effectively increased agricultural production efficiency. Yet in recent years, it has been questioned for constraining further improvement in economic efficiency, because it hampers production at scale.

At the Tangyue cooperative, a profit-sharing model splits dividends according to a 3:3:4 ratio. This means that 30 percent goes to the village to cover public spending, 30 percent goes to the rural cooperative to expand production and the remaining 40 percent is shared by farmers.

Governance reform has also been introduced in the village, which has implemented a “red nine-point rule” governing villagers’ conduct. Villagers are forbidden to host extravagant celebrations to prevent the squandering of money. The performance of village leaders is evaluated and rated and corresponds with their remuneration, with good performers being praised and rewarded, while bad ones are criticized and punished, said Wang Lu, a village official.

Tangyue’s change took place in tandem with other, external development-spurring factors in Guizhou, such as improvements in transportation, including the development of high-speed railways and highways; construction of water-conserving facilities, such as reservoirs and water cellars; and the development of e-commerce, Ma Yonggang, Deputy Director of the Information Office of the Liupanshui government, told Beijing Review. These factors have provided a favorable external environment for Tangyue’s development.

The past five years have been a period of rapid transportation development in Guizhou. All of the province’s counties are now accessible by highway, and all nine of its prefectural-level administrative units are easily accessible by air, according to the local Guizhou Metropolitan Daily. Moreover, an express railway running between Guiyang, capital of Guizhou, and Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, was put into operation in 2014, cutting the previous 20-hour journey to just over four hours.

The region has also seen progress in water conservation efforts. Although Guizhou has plenty of precipitation, due to its karst topography, the soil is thin and has poor water holding capacity, rendering the region vulnerable to drought. In recent years, reservoirs and water cellars have been built to store water for drinking and use in production.

In addition, e-commerce has also boosted local development. In 2016, the province’s e-commerce transaction volume grew by 34.74 percent, directly and indirectly lifting nearly 10,000 people out of poverty, according to the Guizhou Provincial Department of Commerce.

More importantly, better transportation and more communication with the outside world have changed local people’s mindset, Ma said. People have learned from the development experience of more economically advanced coastal regions and realized that there are many development opportunities for them to explore.

In the past, locals thought they could do little to change their conditions. Guizhou is dominated by hills unsuited to traditional crop planting, and farmers did not know how to grow more lucrative agricultural produce. Now they have learned how to farm more lucrative items such as mushrooms and kiwifruit. Villagers in Tangyue have learned vegetable planting skills from experts from other provinces, and introduced some varieties of rice from Thailand, said Zhang.

With the opening of the Luyefangtian Company, a large state-owned farm produce distribution center, in January, Tangyue’s Golden Earth rural cooperative has gained a new sales channel. The company purchases farm produce from rural cooperatives in nearby villages, washes, sorts and packs vegetables and sells them to government departments, schools, hotels, restaurants and even prisons.

The company regularly collects information from customers and partner cooperatives and tries to match them up. The company’s data show that so far it has signed agreements with 120 rural cooperatives, benefiting 6,758 people in 2,640 households.

Tangyue’s success lies in the fact that it has successfully carried out the three-pronged reform, and its experience should be popularized, stated a report of the Policy Research Office of the CPC Guizhou Provincial Committee. Today, Tangyue’s success draws visitors to the village to learn about its experience.

Although Tangyue’s experience is duplicable, its model should not be copied blindly, warned the report, which encourages differentiated and diversified development suitable to local conditions.