Businesses help shake off poverty

Workers at Song Ruisen's dried tofu factory in Huichang county, Jiangxi province. Photos By Zhang Xiao / China Daily

Cattle, medicinal herb and dried tofu companies offer county's residents employment and wealth

Editor's Note: With preferential policies and financial support from the central government, some business-savvy residents in Huichang have started their own businesses to help not only themselves but also their fellow Huichang people alleviate poverty. Below we interview three of these entrepreneurs.

Fu Jianrong will never forget the night his wife, having just given birth to their third child, fell sick and he had no money to take her to hospital.

It was in the late 1970s in a village in Huichang, the southernmost county of South China's Jiangxi province.

Fu, desperate to find his wife treatment, borrowed 10 yuan ($1.50) from his cousin. But just as he set out to take his wife to a clinic, his cousin stopped him and asked for the money back, saying that his wife was mad at him for lending the money to Fu.

No one else would lend Fu the money, so he went home and burst into tears.

He did not give up, however. That night, he caught a bag full of pond loaches, which a doctor at the clinic accepted as a fee for treating his wife.

"I swore to myself then that nothing like that would happen to me again," said Fu, 63, now the owner of a medicine factory and cattle business.

"For a county struggling with poverty for generations like Huichang, whose young people are desperate to leave, the old people left behind have neither the motivation nor ability to make any change."

Since the 1990s, Fu has been collecting herbs to sell to wholesale vendors and medicine factories. This proved so successful that he eventually set up his own medicine company, to exploit the huge potential market value he discovered in a particular type of citrus rind.

He also imported Simmental cattle from Switzerland, which he uses to help villagers in Huichang lift themselves out of poverty.

"For instance, if a village has land and labor, I offer them cut-price calves and buy the cattle back at market price; if a village has only old people, I employ them to work in my farm or teach them to grow fodder," Fu said.

In recent years, he has turned his attention to promoting tourism and developing other medicinal plants that take a long time to grow, but have a higher economic return.

"This business might not make a profit for three or four decades. I am doing something that will outlive me, but it's worth doing for the future of the people," Fu said.

Huichang, a traditionally agricultural county, has an area of 2,700 square km and a population of 520,000. Many there survive by growing rice, vegetables and citrus trees. It is State-supported and poverty-stricken.

The mountainous county featured in a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1934, praising the beauty of its unique landscape.

It was also home, for 10 months in 1932, to Deng Xiaoping, China's former leader who initiated the country's process of reform and opening-up.

In 1977, Song Ruisen and some local officials went to Beijing for a national convention. They wanted to bring Deng Xiaoping some dried tofu, a local snack that has been made and eaten in the county for hundreds of years.

"We had yet to leave our province and the dried tofu had already gone bad. It was so embarrassing," Song recalled.

"Travelers and guests from outside liked the special taste. Almost every family here cooks it, but we had no idea how to keep it fresh and make money from it."

Determined to make a business out of the local delicacy, in the early 1990s, Song and his friend Jiang Chi co-founded a food company to produce dried tofu.

"Two decades ago, Huichang had no modern production lines, processing and packaging technology, or skilled workers," he said.

The pair visited big cities such as Shanghai and learned new production and sales techniques.

They designed special equipment to process the dried tofu and with the help of special poverty-support loans, they bought machines and hired workers.

Now their company's annual revenue is 15 million yuan and their dried tofu is sold across the province and in neighboring areas.

In the next issue, we will report on the 42-square-km swathe of undulating topography in Huichang county and the Meilin Temple on the Panshan Mountains, another major tourist attraction in the county.

Fu Jianrong at his cattle farm in Huichang.