Liang Bao, “The Lüliang Man”

During our six-month journey of interviews, the Publicity Center under the Provincial Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development helped us contact interviewees and address other related issues. After leaving Lin County, we passed by Liulin and went to Shilou County, another deeply impoverished county in Lüliang City. After briefing us on the interviewees on the phone, the provincial officials advised us to visit the “Lüliang Man.”

The Lüliang Man is a movie about the life of Liang Bao, the Party Secretary of CPC Xuejiayuan Village Committee of Shilou County, who dedicated his life to leading the villagers to get out of poverty and work towards a wealthy life. He died on the frontline of anti-poverty fight.

Liang Bao passed away in December 2012.

Six years after his death, his name is still frequently brought up by people of government bodies and ordinary people in Lüliang City. Prior to his death, the standing committee of the CPC County Committee, after wrapping up the official meeting, naturally discussed about Liang Bao's disease and treatment. The leaders of the Provincial Commission for Disciplinary Inspection called to ask about his treatment.

Liang Bao has become a spiritual symbol. His morality and deeds are highly symbolic of the qualities required for the village officials in the new era. The governmental and public tribute and honor to him are more about the recognition and appreciation of his qualities from a cultural perspective.

Shilou County is adjacent to Yonghe County, both located along the Yellow River. Just like fellow sufferers, the two counties had the poorest agricultural conditions among the deeply impoverished counties in Lüliang. Years ago, the early human cave sites were unearthed in Shilou County. Those caves had the trace of being painted with chalk soil. Later, a bronze ware from Shang Dynasty was excavated in Shilou County. According to local folklore, Shilou County is the hometown of Jiang Ziya (a renowned figure in the Zhou Dynasty) and scholars in the county are finding evidence to prove it. From the discovery of the prehistoric human caves and the excavation of bronze ware from the Shang Dynasty, we can easily tell that the Loess Plateau has a long farming history. The areas that were developed earlier see even more severe soil erosion and deeper and wider gullies. It's very difficult to find a flat area there.

However, the situation seems better in Xuejiayuan Village, the hometown of Liang Bao. The administrative village of Xuejiaxuan comprised three natural villages, namely Xuejiayuan, Qiushuyuan and Wangjiayuan, with a population of 321 in 102 households. Except gullies, the only resource they got is land. Seen from a high place, the whole village is like an unfolded palm on the loess tableland that's split by gullies into two. The tableland is relatively flat, which is rare in Shilou County. In the past, people lived halfway up the mountain and had to go downhill to carry water from the bottom of the gully that's a few miles away. At the end of 2015, the per capita income in the village was around RMB4,000. In 2015, 27 households with 77 people were regarded as poverty-stricken. In 2016, there were two natural deaths and two more poverty-stricken households with 7 people. In August 2017, there were 24 impoverished households with 67 people in the village after dynamic updates of the statistics.

Ms. Gao Jizhou, in charge of publicity from the county Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, accompanied us to Xuejiayuan. When we drove through the cement roads, she told us the road was built under the leadership of Liang Bao. When the car made a turn and arrived in front of a steep slope, she told us that Liang Bao showed the symptom of hematemesis for the first time here. That day, a tractor was buried under the soil because of the collapsed dam. He rushed back to the village to call for help. Maybe he ran too fast and he vomited blood. At the time, as Fenyang Medical College was paired with Xuejiayuan to provide the latter with medical assistance, he was sent to Fenyang by the members of poverty-alleviating task force and was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

The traces of Liang Bao can be found everywhere.

After arriving at the village, we found it very clean and tidy. Clearly, the village Party committee and the villagers' committee (“the two committees”) have been doing a great job after getting out of poverty. The two committees work on the second floor of a two-story building that used to be part of a school. The ground floor of the building was used as“the exhibition hall of Liang Bao's great deeds” funded by the municipal government.

The current village Party Secretary is a younger brother of Liang Bao. He is an honest man who doesn't like to talk. When asked about his senior brother, he told us that he can't bear talking about it and it would make him extremely sad.

So we went to visit the exhibition hall to better know about Liang Bao.

No wonder his younger brother was too sad to talk about it. The elder brother was like a father to him. Liang Bao, born in March 1959, had three elder sisters, two younger brothers and two younger sisters. His father died when he's 16 and the youngest brother was only 5. After his elder sisters got married, Liang Bao took the responsibility of taking care of his younger siblings. He once talked to his daughter that, “Your grandfather had eight children and gave four of them to me.”

He began to shoulder the responsibility as the head of a family at an early age. After getting married, he helped his younger siblings to get married as well. He suffered a lot. At the time, Liang Bao was the head of the people's militia in the village. Then Party Secretary Zheng Guoqi valued Liang Bao's hard-working, capable and skilled qualities and made Liang Bao a protégé. In June 1982, Liang Bao joined the Party at the recommendation of Zheng Guoqi. In 1984, Zheng took Liang Bao to attend the officials' meeting in the county and asked Liang to convey the instructions from the meeting to the villagers. Liang Bao said bluntly, “Our village needs to gain access to electricity, drinking water and cement roads. That's the guiding principle of the meeting.”

The villagers found it hard to forget the words, while looking up to the young man who supported the whole family after his father died.

Then, after being elected as the Party Secretary, he led the villagers to level the land, develop agriculture with the help of science, divert water to build roads, and gain access to electricity. In addition to infrastructure construction, he led the villagers to develop courtyard economy and plant walnut trees. He applied his skills to support the family to the village governance. The villagers gradually regarded him as the head of the village family. No change in the village had been easy. He's been busy with a wide range of matters, from applying for subsidy from the county government and finding collaborators to implement projects to resolving disputes over compensation for land acquisition.

For example, the renovation of the roads into the village has entered the third phase.

In the past, people had to go through winding narrow roads over a ridge and several ditches to go out of the village. It took them almost half a day to go to the township seat to buy a bottle of vinegar. Several generations hadn't seen a large vehicle or a tractor in the village. An old man who had never left the village said that he didn't see a car or a tractor in his life, but he saw airplanes. In earlier years, he saw dozens of Japanese aircraft carrying bombs flying over.

During the first phase, the winding narrow paths in the village were built into an unsurfaced road that's two meters wide, making it possible for small agricultural vehicles to drive into the village. Since then, the villagers began to use agricultural machinery. During the second phase, the road was widened to be three meters wide and paved with cement, with a subsidy of RMB39,000 from the county government plus a high-interest loan of RMB130,000 in the name of Liang Bao. During the third phase, Liang Bao planned to build a standard highway, but no one in his family supported him, since the previous loan hasn't been paid off. However, in the autumn of 2010, the project of building a road that's 1,730 meters long and 6 meters wide started as scheduled, with a total investment of RMB1.2 million. He's personally involved in every link of the project from comparing prices of cement and sands, mechanical mixture, rolling compaction, later maintenance, to acceptance check.

During the third phase, he got sick, but he thought it's no big deal and didn't take it seriously, since the project must be finished as scheduled. Once, a reporter saw him measuring something with the construction team while talking to a woman about the compensation.

The author of the stories about Liang Bao's meritorious deeds is Gao Jizhou who accompanied us. She particularly mentioned in her article that the second phase of the road building left Liang Bao heavily in debt, while the third phase almost cost his life.

The statistics show that Liang Bao served for 29 years as the villagers' committee director and the village party secretary. He had led the villagers to level 1,540 mu of land, turning the land on mountain ridges and steep slopes into standard farmland. He also led the people to return 818 mu of marginal farmland to forests, create forests of 1,585 mu on barren hills, develop economic forests of 2,400 mu , plant walnut trees on a land of 1,600 mu, build vegetable greenhouses, and establish an automatic pig farm with a capacity of 5,000 marketable pigs. By 2010, the total revenue from walnuts reached RMB1.5 million, delivering an additional per capital income of RMB4,573 in the village. In 2011, the per capita net income of Xuejiayuan Village reached RMB4,500, as against the average per capita income of RMB1,081 in Shilou County.

The death of Liang Bao left the whole county in great sadness and deep mourning. Liang Bao's words remained fresh in people's memory. The people reported the stories and the words of Liang Bao to the publicity department. Those words, though not heroic, were remembered deeply because they were the voice of the people and because Liang Bao is a great leader by the people's standards. Here are some of his quotes:

Rural work is not as difficult or complex as you would imagine. Be fair. Be strict. Then, you could do a great job.

What's the use of village officials? There's no excuse for us to avoid building the roads. We will build the roads even by hand.

Why did the people vote for you? What's the job of a party secretary? The one and only purpose is for a better life of all villagers.

If the villagers' life didn't improve, it's the fault of the officials.

Whoever is the leader, it's a must for people to gain access to drinking water, roads and electricity. Otherwise, what did the people vote you for?

What matters is to improve the village appearance and help the people get rich. I don't care if I'm poorer.

…

He lived for two more years after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, which is a miracle. According to Gao Jizhou, he delayed his treatment for a long time, since he wanted the road-building project to proceed as scheduled. He postponed the first chemotherapy for a month, even though the doctor at Fenyang Medical College told him that month was the optimal period for the treatment.

He didn't do it since he was too busy with the six projects at hand. The intermittent chemotherapy didn't work well. Two years later in December 2012, he fell down on his way to pick breeding pigs for the pig farm in the village and never got up.

Countless people were greatly touched by Liang Bao's stories of leading the villagers to get rich. In December 2011, he was named one of the ten most inspiring role models in Shanxi Province. In February 2012, he was honored as “Contemporary Hero in Lüliang” by the CPC Lüliang Municipal Committee and Lüliang Municipal Government.

Today, Xuejiayuan Village has rows of houses, luxuriant fruit trees, cement roads running through the village, and bulletin boards advocating cultural customs or publicizing policies. The village has developed agritainment and picking gardens. At the entrance to the village, there is a large amusement park for children.

The contractor of the amusement park is Zheng Mingming, 35 years old. He got excited after learning that we'd like to know more about Liang Bao. He told us that Liang Bao introduced him to join the Party in 2005 and that Liang Bao is his guide.

He said, “When Liang Bo was elected Party Secretary, Xuejiayuan was a poor village in ruins, barely with access to drinking water and electricity. He was young at the time and had no strings to pull, so he went to the electricity bureau for a dozen times to finally get the electricity quota. Without the start-up funds, he borrowed RMB2,500 from the credit union to get altogether RMB4,500, ending the history of using kerosene lamps in the village.”

“At the time, it took the villagers one hour to carry a bucket of water from the gullies to home. I knew very early that Liang Bao always went to the city to seek policy support, raise funds and fight for projects. It happened that the Project Office of the municipal government was engaged in the rural poverty alleviation, he got a fund of over RMB100,000 for the village. The fund was used to build the reservoir, install a pump to get the water from the gully up to the water tower in the village, and deliver the water to every household through pipes. In this way, he resolved the villagers' difficulties in having access to drinking water.”

“It took him only about a year to solve the villagers' difficulties with drinking water and electricity.”

Afterwards, Liang Bao planned to build roads for the village. In the past, the path got so muddy on rainy days that it was difficult to walk on. Back then, Zheng Mingming was the only kid enrolled in an urban school. On rainy days, he arrived at the school with mud-covered trousers and was laughed at by other kids who dubbed him ‘muddy legs from the village’. Zheng Mingming remembered that when he was in junior high school in 1996, Liang Bao began to lead the villagers to widen the paths. The unsurfaced roads into the village were too narrow and had to be repaired every year. Since it was too narrow for a vehicle to pass through, the villagers had to carry on shoulder the farm products to sell to urban areas and the things they bought from urban areas to home. Back then, there was no digger and they built roads by hand. In 2005, the unsurfaced road was paved with cement. During the time, grasses encroached his own farmland, since he spent almost 24 hours on the construction site and got no time or energy to take care of his own farmland. After the road was built, he found that even with the subsidies, there was a shortage of RMB130,000 for the project. That's why he went to apply for the high-interest loan. Until today, his daughter is helping to pay back the remaining RMB70,000 of that loan.

Then, as a series of national policies in support of rural areas were launched, it got easier for Liang Bao to apply for subsidies from county and township governments to renovate the village. During the past decade, all villagers moved from earthen cave dwellings on the hillside to the brick houses on the plain. The housing conditions improved significantly and each family had a large courtyard. In Henan Province, he noticed that local people grow vegetables and fruit trees in the courtyard and decided to popularize the practice in the village. As such, he led the villagers to develop courtyard economy and sell the products to the county seat.

Zheng Mingming was working in Tianjin at the time, but he was concerned about the changes in his hometown. After he heard that Liang Bao fell ill and was hospitalized, he went to visit him. It never occurred to him that Liang Bao who has been so capable could look so old and weak. Liang Bao told Zheng that, “Mingming, I've always believed that you have a promising future. When there are good opportunities, you can come back to our village. Today, the state attaches even more importance to the rural development and there's great potential for development in rural areas. When you come back, you can lead the villagers to unlock the potential.”

Zheng Mingming said he was born and grew up in the village, but he left the village for college at 19. Upon graduation from college at 22, he was employed by the sales department of a listed company in Tianjin. Later, he worked as the manager in charge of floor heating in the Rifeng Pipeline (Shanxi Branch). He was doing fine away from his hometown, and his hometown has undergone dramatic changes and it is far different from what he knew about it in his childhood.

So Zheng Mingming decided to come back to the village. Moreover, as his parents were getting older and his younger brother was abroad, it's better for him to stay in the village. Such well-educated and forward-looking young people like Zheng Mingming have been used to the urban life, but they always lack a sense of belonging. They care about every tiny change in the village and believe deep in the heart that they are rooted in the village. Last year, Zheng Mingming was elected deputy Party Secretary of the village, which seemed to be his destiny.

“Uncle Liang Bao has set a great example for me. I'd like to bring some tangible benefits to the villagers.”

Rural officials have undoubtedly played a significant role in the fundamental changes in the villages. Both Liu Guizhen from Yanmen Pass and Liang Bao are rural elites. Liu Guizhen is dedicated for over 30 years to serving as a doctor and a teacher in her village. To the villagers, she is the one that implements the national favorable policies at the grassroots level, as well as the representative of the state government with great charisma. It's natural for her to be elected as the party secretary and the villagers' committee director. By comparison, Liang Bao represents a different type of rural elites. He's a versatile rural leader who excelled at communicating with superiors, implementing policies in an innovative, courageous and responsible way, and striking a balance between the interests of the nation, villagers and families. He's committed to governing the village and then enriching the people, in a bid to build the backward and secluded village into part of the mainstream society. He's a typical service-oriented rural official who serves the public interest in the new era. The local rural elites all focus on the infrastructure improvement. From the anti-poverty perspective, they attach more importance to eliminating relative poverty, narrowing the gap between villages and cities, and paving the way for common prosperity.

On the other hand, facing the changes in the pattern of village governance in the new era, the villages are in urgent need of service-oriented officials who serve the public interest. It has been found that in the villages with a great team of the party committee and the villagers' committee, the fight against poverty is more efficient, more successful and less stressful. The villages that did a poor job in poverty alleviation coincide with those with a poor team of the party committee and the villagers' committee.

The stories about Liu Guizhen, Liang Bao and many other local village officials have been quite enlightening for the new round of poverty alleviation.