Mao's model farm prospers under market economy

---

The sun is always red; Chairman Mao is the dearest. Thirty years after the Cultural Revolution, songs and slogans praising the late Chinese leader still resound in Dazhai, a village in the backwater of China's northern Shanxi Province and an example of rural development under Mao-era planned economy.
Such attractions of legacy, alongwith modern hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops, built like traditional cave dwellings, are landmarks of the model village. It attracts more than 300,000 tourists with an earning of 4 million yuan (513,000 U.S. dollars) from tourism, a year.
Last year, Dazhai, with an area of less than two square kilometres and a population of 500 reported a per capita net income of 7,000 yuan (900 U.S. dollars), nearly twice the national average of 3,587 yuan (460 U.S. dollars) for Chinese farmers in the same period.
In three years, the figure is expected to reach 10,000 yuan (1,282 U.S. dollars), said Guo Fenglian, female leader of the village, in the Taihang Mountains.
Guo was an "iron girl" in the 1960s for leading her fellow farmers to fight poor natural conditions and achieve outstanding grain yields. Mao made Dazhai, a model of rural development for other Chinese villages to follow.
"In agriculture, learn from Dazhai," he said. Nearly ten million people from China and abroad visited the farm.
The village suffered a ten-year recession after the Cultural Revolution of 1976. But it is thriving as China became the world's factory again under its socialist market economy. A much older Guo attended the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Beijing in 2002, declaring: 'Mao's model village no more relied on farming'.
Now Secretary of the CPC Dazhai village committee, she led the villagers to set up numerous productive units like garment, cement, food and beverage, coal mining, transportation and trade. The Dazhai walnut juice has become a nationwide brand. The landmark terraced farming slopes, once a prototype for rural development, have been returned to forests to maintain harmony between man and nature.
The village is planning to establish a 30-million-yuan (3.8 million U.S. dollar) plant to produce bio-fuel out of sorghum and cassava, said Guo.
Local businesses earned 5 million yuan (641,000 U.S. dollars) annually in the past five years, enabling villagers to enjoy better social welfare than the rest of China's 900 million rural population.
Free education at kindergartens and primary schools, a monthly pension of more than 100 yuan (13 U.S. dollars) for people over 60, cash rewards for college students and medical insurance benefiting all the villagers, make Dazhai different from other villages. The village, as a collective, still keeps a reserve fund to improve infrastructure, avoid yawning income gap and seek continuous development in a more "scientific manner," she said.
"Who says Dazhai is not allowed to seek reform and economic development as everyone else?" she said, refuting criticism that the its endeavours to make profits have "diluted" the so-called" Dazhai spirit."
"The Dazhai spirit remains unchanged: in the hardest days we relied on ourselves and fought with all the hard work to achieve the impossible; today we need to carry forward the legacy," Guo said.
Xinhua