Zhang Guifang, secretary of the post-95 village branch: To lead the villagers to become rich, it is still necessary to rely on the land itself

Zhang Guifang, the post-95 village branch secretary, hoped that her story of becoming a village cadre would bring traffic to the village, bring resources, and help the villagers become rich

"To lead the villagers to become rich, it is still up to the land itself"

In 2020, when I received the call from her hometown in Henan, 23-year-old Zhang Guifang had just graduated from Tianjin Agricultural College for a year and was running a homestay with friends.

At that time, just in time for the village election, an old party member pulled out a list of young people affiliated with the party organization in the village, and the old people called one by one in the order of their names and strokes. There are many people with the surname Zhang in the village, and Zhang Guifang's name ranks in the top five. On the phone, the other party strongly invited her to serve in the village and contribute to the development of the village. Zhang Guifang said that she couldn't remember which sentence moved her heart, but she wanted to give it a try and see if she could do something for the development of her hometown.

Zhang Guifang returned to the village and was elected as the secretary of the party branch of three villages in Shilin Town, Shancheng District, Hebi City, with a high vote in the general election at the end of 2020. Determined to do this new job well, she handed over the homestay in Tianjin to a friend. In the more than two years since she returned to the village, she is the youngest cadre here, and a young force in the aging and hollowing out village.

"The reason why everyone chose me is because in this twilight village, people want to see young faces and [let me] accompany them." In mid-March this year, Zhang Guifang posted a video about the life of the village branch secretary. Within two days, she received thousands of messages and private messages.

The story of a young man becoming a village cadre quickly became popular, and Zhang Guifang hoped that this story would bring traffic and resources to the village to help her "lead the villagers to become rich".

"Big things are small, and they are made up"

Beijing News: After returning home, what impression did the village give you?

Zhang Guifang: My family's village is Sanjia Village, Shilin Town, Shancheng District, Hebi City, Henan Province, 20 kilometers away from Hebi City. In my opinion, this is a "very ordinary" village, not rich and has little character.

The entire village is aging quite high. The village has a permanent population of about 400 people, 80% of whom are over 60 years old, and the rest are mostly middle-aged people over 50 years old.

The old man was not idle, and he could always see people in their sixties and seventies still planting fields, corn and wheat. However, the income of the villagers is not high, and the per capita annual income is about 10,000 yuan. I met villagers on the road, and they sometimes chatted with me. I often hear them ask me, "When will you be able to use this land?" When can we people earn more money? ”

Maybe because I'm a college student, people in the village will be polite when they talk to me. What impressed me was that across from the village council where I worked, there lived an old grandfather, almost 90 years old. Once I met him, I happened to have two oranges in my pocket, and I gave them to him. Grandpa immediately went home and brought me a pack of cookies. Another time, I gave him two pieces of candy, and when I met him again, he always pulled a few white rock candies out of his pocket for me to eat. This is indeed the warmth unique to the countryside, working in the city, which neighbor will greet you like this every day?

Beijing News: What kind of job is a village branch secretary?

Zhang Guifang: Many of the young people in the village work in the district and the city, and they come back to visit the elderly. Only I walked around the village from morning to night.

The daily work of the village branch secretary is relatively trivial, including conflict and dispute mediation, environmental sanitation improvement, daily security patrols, etc., and the more common example is the conflict between two villagers over the boundary of the land, and both sides feel that the other has a variety of one and a half meters of land. This requires us to re-measure the land and divide it again. We also need to implement the above regulations, such as going to every villager's home during the Spring Festival to check whether they have bought fireworks and fireworks, and remind them not to set them off.

The bigger job is to find ways to develop industry in the village, and at the moment we are mainly focusing on introducing crops and cash crops. Specifically, I wrote the project plan with my colleagues, handed it to the superiors, and took the initiative to fight for funds. Although I also manage when I run the homestay, the project in the village is not a game with a small company.

Our projects are sometimes rejected on the grounds that "the amount of money invested in the project is too large", "the rate of return is too low", or "the benefits to the masses are not large enough". At this point I had to revise it again, and I changed the project plan up to five times.

Beijing News: Are you comfortable with this job? Did you have fun?

Zhang Guifang: In the first three months of working as a village branch secretary, I still had a lot of negative emotions. The main reason is that I have not worked in the village, I do not know the working environment here, nor can I do what I can do and what I will do.

For example, in terms of environmental remediation, we proposed to dig a channel and deepen and widen it to make the small river in the village wider and cleaner. But the problem is that there is no funding. At first, our project was not approved, but later, after the heavy rains in Henan in 2021, we took advantage of the "post-disaster reconstruction" policy-oriented east wind to apply for relevant funds and improve the river. But only part of it, because the funds are not enough. In 2022, we got another amount of money, so we invested in the river project and did another part.

Maybe young people want to do something big and want to do it all at once, but that's not the case. In the village, if you want to make a project, you need to have a plan first, and then slowly wait, observe the policy, attract investment, and strive for opportunities before you can find funds. I learned this slowly.

For the first three months, I always felt like I couldn't do big things, a little impatient, and frustrated. At that time, I did not take the initiative to communicate with colleagues and leaders, and I was wondering if my social skills were not enough. I also wondered if I wasn't a good fit for the job.

But you can't suddenly pick and choose. At that time, I still felt the high expectations placed on me by the villagers, including my parents. My dad always bought me clothes online. At the village committee, I also "supervised" four colleagues, all of whom were older than me, two in their thirties and two in their fifties. They often persuade me that "big things are small, and they are made up", which means that we can't deal with big things, but we can deal with small things little by little.

"Rainbow Village" failed to become a hit

Beijing News: What was the first major thing you did in the village?

Zhang Guifang: The first big project I did independently in the village was "Rainbow Village". In 2020, when I first came to serve in the village, I often brushed Xiaohongshu to watch netizens post about what the Internet celebrity village was like. I have the impression that many southern villages are very beautiful, and the villages are painted with brilliant colors. Later, I hired a painter to paint our village and paint on the walls. The painter told me that there is a village in Henan called "Xiaotun Village", which is a popular village in Huixian City. A post-90s boy hand-painted graffiti on the outer wall of the village was also liked on social media by Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry at the time.

I went to see it myself and took the villagers to visit the site, and the villagers thought that this was a good idea, and when the party congress was held in the village, no one opposed me. It took us a month to ask a painter to help us paint the walls on the main road of the village in bright colors, like a rainbow. After brushing, I thought that I would definitely attract many people to check in in the village, and if there were many people, I would be able to set up a small stall to sell things and make a market. The more people pay attention to the "Rainbow Village", the resources will come.

But apart from people from the village next door, no one actually came. I also sent Weibo private messages to many official media accounts, but there was no news. Finally, I asked the leader to help introduce media resources, and finally a local media reporter in Henan published the first report, and the "Rainbow Village" began to be known.

Beijing News: When did you explore a better direction?

Zhang Guifang: "Rainbow Village" failed to become a hit, which also made me think a lot. I was thinking that in the countryside, it may still be necessary to rely on agriculture to increase the income of the villagers.

In the past two years, we have tried to introduce some of the more profitable crops, such as echinacea, which already has villages that make a profit. However, due to the lack of professional and technical personnel in our village, improper management, we still did not earn money. Last summer, we introduced a pumpkin planting project where contractors went to the village to rent land, teach villagers techniques, and hire villagers to farm the land. I followed up the whole project, responsible for handling small disputes and conflicts between villagers and contractors, and docking the implementation of this project.

In this project, male villagers can earn 60 yuan a day, women can earn 50 yuan, and everyone can earn nearly <>,<> yuan more a year. In addition, villagers who rent out their land can also receive land transfer fees, which are about several thousand yuan a year. This is the first time I have helped the villagers increase their income, and it is also the first industry in our three villages. This made me realize that leading the villagers to prosperity depends on the land itself.

"You are still valuable here"

Beijing News: What are your hopes for the future of the village?

Zhang Guifang: I often participate in study activities organized by the town, district and city governments, and basically visit other people's villages every three months. In Puyang City, Henan Province, there is a "village-level city" called Xixinzhuang, and their village has kindergartens, primary schools, junior high schools, high schools, and its own hospital, and the infrastructure is complete. I remember that the village had a unified supply of gas, and the villagers enjoyed a certain amount of free supply.

I envy such a village, I hope that the environment in the village is getting better and better, and the happiness of the villagers' life is getting higher and higher, which is also the direction of the future development of the village.

There are many village-run enterprises in Xixinzhuang Village, which also inspires me. In the future, I also want to find professional and technical personnel in agriculture, and invite them to the village to grow a variety of crops such as pumpkin, red wheat, and triticale. Recently, after I became popular on Douyin, many people approached me to talk about cooperation, and I said that the first requirement was to "revitalize our land".

Beijing News: What is the sense of value of this job?

Zhang Guifang: Perhaps influenced by my parents, I have known since I was a child that "people must be self-aware". After I became a member of the village, I was not moved by myself, but more often I was looking for a sense of value.

I do a lot of little things. After the "Rainbow Village" was reported by the media, people who do public welfare found me, and they donated a lot of materials to the village after the heavy rain in Henan in 2021. I also docked a pension project, which was handed over to the social work station in the district to do, and the social workers went to the village from time to time to organize the elderly to participate in paper-cutting activities, or sing a play to the villagers, and the village also put two public washing machines, which were also put into this pension project.

In the past two years, my colleagues and I have built some field roads, solar street lights, water pipe networks, and set up small libraries and small movie theaters. This month, a colleague said that he was getting married for 40 years, and I thought of giving villagers free wedding photos. The colleague was shy and refused to appear, and finally filmed several other pairs of old villagers.

When reporters came to the village, some villagers would praise me for a good job as a young man, and I was very moved. But to be honest, there is still nothing that I find particularly valuable.

More truly, sometimes I lie in bed, think back, count how many things I have done for the village, and suddenly realize that I am still valuable here.

Zhang Guifang

Born in 1997, graduated from Tianjin Agricultural College in 2019. After graduating from university, Zhang Guifang chose to stay in Tianjin and run a homestay with a friend, responsible for management. In 2020, Zhang Guifang returned to her hometown to participate in the election of village party branch secretaries held in three villages in Shilin Town, Shancheng District, Hebi City, Henan Province, and was elected with a high vote. In 2021, Zhang Guifang proposed the idea of a painted wall and was supported by the villagers, and painted the main streets of the three villages with paint, from which the village was named "Rainbow Village". In January 2023, Zhang Guifang attended the first meeting of the 1th People's Congress of Hebi City as a deputy to the Municipal People's Congress.

A10-A11 edition writing/Beijing News reporter Shi Runqiao