Chinese village a capitalist utopia

HUAXI (CHINA): Universal health care, free education, three-storey villas and cars — a capitalist utopia under Communist rule in China seems to have arrived early for the residents of one Yangtze River Delta village.

In Huaxi, a booming market town of 36,000 in the affluent eastern province of Jiangsu, every family has at least one house, two cars and $250,000 in the bank.

Officials from elsewhere in China tour Huaxi to find out how this once sleepy village, just 576 residents in the 1950s, is now so rich and why non-local businessmen would donate million-dollar factories to buy the privilege of a local residence permit.

Wu Renbao, 80, Huaxi’s village chief for over 50 years, tells the touring officials to throw out their ideological hand-books and leave politics to politicians.

“One of the slogans back then was ‘be politically correct and boost production’,” Wu said, recalling his tenure as village head during the tumultuous decades after the Communist Party swept to power in 1949.

“But in fact, all they wanted to do was to be politically correct. There was no boosting of production. I thought production was the most important thing.”

In Huaxi, Wu is regarded with the same reverence some Chinese reserve for late leader Mao Zedong, whose determination to smash capitalism and shore up his power base led to disastrous economic policies and the chaotic 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

In fact Wu’s pragmatic policies pre-date by many years the arrival in power of Deng Xiaoping, Communist China’s most celebrated pragmatist who survived Maoist purges to launch the nation’s economic revolution in the late 1970s.

“During the day, my bosses would come to supervise my work. We would always wait until they left and then work extra hours at night,” said Wu, who chose to implement only those official policies that would better farmers’ lives, while ignoring the rest.

Farmers are now a rare sight in industrialized Huaxi, whose growth has absorbed neighboring villages and drawn another 60,000 migrant workers to work in local residents’ businesses.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com