Can a Village Party Secretary’s Ecological Farming Drive Succeed? | Grandma Kouzi
I. A Village Party Secretary Bursts from Nowhere
I was taken a little aback.
That was 23 February 2022. The reason I remember so vividly is that, from the moment I moved into the Valley of Villains in 2021 until this very day, he is the only person who has answered me that way.
Ever since the Valley of Villains came into my life, however, my interest in the outside world has been reset to zero. All I care about is my little half-acre plot, and I mentioned to them that refusing chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides is the most important part of ecological farming…
And just then, a Cheng Yaojin burst upon the scene—the neighbour’s guest, who had been sitting with his back to us all along, turned round and butted in: “Ecological farming? I’d like to give it a try.”
That man brought his teacup over to join our table, and that is how we came to know Fan Hanquan.
When he introduced himself, I was startled again: he was actually a Village Party Secretary.
By then I had been in the Valley of Villains for less than a year, and my outlook had shifted considerably. At first, when it came to ecological farming, I would say it to anyone who listened: clean land, air, and water do not exist in isolation—they require more people working together. But I soon stopped. Not because I changed, but because I grew tired. Talking was always a waste of breath, so why bother?
Sure enough, within the first few minutes of conversation, Fan Hanquan uttered a “but”. The moment I heard it, a familiar gloom settled over me—after “but”, good news rarely follows: “Ecological farming is all very well, but we can’t manage it here.”
Yet Fan Hanquan was different. He laid out some of the difficulties, and then went on: “But I still want to have a go.”
II. The Vanishing Village
I was willing to go because he was willing to try ecological farming. My older friends went because they were looking to settle down, and Meicuntou had promised incomers support in the one-two-three and legal safeguards in the four-five-six range. What attracted another friend from Xiamen was Fan Hanquan’s suggestion of adapting the “rice-shareholder” model used by his farming colleagues in Taiwan, combining it with a “buy rice, lease land” scheme to practise ecological farming.
Fan Hanquan himself neither farms nor knows how to farm. He left home after junior secondary school and later built a life and a career elsewhere. The reason he became a “flying” Village Party Secretary—one who rarely lives in the village he oversees (2005–2009; 2015 to the present)—is simply that there was no one else. Not only was there no one to take on the role; no one even wanted to stay in the village.
Meicuntou is the most remote administrative village from the Liancheng county seat and also the largest by area. Its registered population exceeds a thousand, but fewer than four hundred actually reside there. Opportunities are scarce deep in these mountains, and only the eldest, last generation of farmers remains. As the old pass on, the village may simply disappear. The word Fan Hanquan uses is “village extinction.”
Most of the traditional timber Hakka houses stood empty. The little village had a grandiose village committee headquarters: a two-storey building with a large sports ground, once a school. The government’s programme of village consolidation and school mergers had only hastened the village’s decline. The quiet mountain hamlet was genuinely beautiful, but for my older friends who flitted between Yunnan and Hainan, roving from Xining all the way into Tibet, it clearly lacked pull.
The companion watching ecological farming and the buy-rice-lease-land model eyed the pesticide bottles by the field edges with unease, pointing out that the scheme had strict requirements for eliminating chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Plainly, Fan Hanquan looked deflated, yet he still said: “Even if the buy-rice, lease-land model falls through, I still want to give it a try. I’ll use my family’s own plot and get my dad to farm it.”
But Father Fan worried that “without chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, the rice won’t grow.” I have heard that line so many times, especially from this generation of farmers. They caught the wave just as chemical fertilisers and pesticides arrived, hybrid varieties were introduced, and herbicides swept the fields. Yields rose across the board, living standards improved, and compared with the generation before them they had it good—which enabled them to send children like Fan Hanquan off to live even better lives. Their labour had been soaked in chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides; their daily meals lost among packets of MSG and chicken-stock seasoning. They had built a blind faith in chemicals, which is perhaps more alarming than the physical harm.
Humanity has farmed for over ten thousand years. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides have been in China for barely fifty. How could crops fail to grow without them? They say you don’t know how hard farming is until you try it yourself—well, I farm my own land and feed myself from the soil.
When we touched on how today’s high-yield improved varieties are unsuited to ecological farming, I introduced Jinyan from Jinboyuan Farm in Shanghang—ten years of ecological farming, in a village also in the Meihua Mountain at a thousand metres’ altitude. What Jinboyuan can do, Meicuntou can surely manage.
Father Fan merely smiled and said nothing. I knew that was simply the Hakka courtesy extended to a guest. Fan Hanquan said, “I’ll get in touch right away,” and I too smiled in silence—more likely it was just words.
III. How Much Can a Tribute Rice Yield?
In autumn, Fan Hanquan sent me a bag of his rice. It truly tasted wonderful, but the yield was low. He had specifically bought a fancy land-measuring gadget to calculate output precisely: 296 jin of milled rice per mu. The yield was admittedly modest, but it was enough to convince Father Fan and the onlookers.
Later, the Valley of Villains also planted the same variety of tribute rice—190 square metres, yielding 154 jin of paddy. At a seventy-per-cent milling recovery rate, that works out to 370 jin of rice per mu; add the second-season rice three months later and it clears four hundred comfortably. It seems I really do have a gift for growing rice.
What impressed me even more than Meicuntou’s first ecological farming trial was Fan Hanquan’s “integrity mechanism”.
In Taiwan, the system relied on “consumer trust plus producer self-discipline”. But Fan Hanquan devised something new: he installed cameras at the field edges, wired up via Wi-Fi, so land-lessees could monitor their plots twenty-four hours a day from their phones. It was, in his words, “an integrity mechanism built on a premise of distrust”.
My regret is that the buy-rice, lease-land scheme never materialised in 2022, and I feared Fan Hanquan would lose momentum. Happily, the endeavour kept going, and the area even expanded. In 2023, although the buy-rice, lease-land model still had not been put into practice, the village collective contracted fifty mu of terraced fields from scattered smallholders, consolidated and rehabilitated them in a single block, publicly invited oversight, and committed to no chemical fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides. Fan Hanquan demonstrated the fields under restoration on his phone-monitoring system—the stretch of land just behind the village committee offices.
This time, however, it was the village collective investing, hiring people to farm, with only cursory management, and the rice yield worked out to a mere hundred-odd jin per mu.
IV. Ecological Farming Has No Way Back
Though he understood nothing of farming to begin with, over time he slowly began talking about soil amendment, enzymes, EM (Effective Microorganisms), comparing Permaculture and the Shuoming farming method… He truly had put his heart into it.
Unfortunately, neither Fan Hanquan nor Meicuntou had much luck; the various attempts fell short of expectations. In 2023, the village even took on the rather lively “Thousand-Person Hiking Festival”. But I was never optimistic about big events—you pour everything in just to hear a bang. At the time it brought the village almost no income, and afterwards there were no repeat visitors either.
Fan Hanquan often rattles off cases like “specialty tourism igniting the mountains” and “outsiders revitalising old villages and towns,” dreaming that a windfall of prosperity might come tumbling down on Meicuntou too. I know of many such cases and have even visited some. Beyond the very real landscape and the ever-elusive luck, there is one critical ingredient: people. And people are precisely what Meicuntou lacks most—no people, no money, no content, no opportunities: a vicious circle.
Meicuntou is far removed from educational and industrial resources, which has “driven” the locals away. Fan Hanquan himself is a case in point; his business and family are based in Pengkou Town, closer to the county seat and with a high-speed rail station. The area’s natural advantages lie hidden deep in the mountains, unknown to the outside, while this very remoteness “shuts out” outsiders.
The revitalisation of old villages always starts with outsiders who create something distinctive, which in turn draws more outsiders and lures locals back, setting off a virtuous circle. The crux is always the first wave of outsiders.
What could Meicuntou offer to attract outsiders? Refusing chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, creating a patch of unspoiled earth—perhaps that would draw more like-minded ecological farmers.
In 2024, those few dozen mu already detoxified and reclaimed had been left fallow once again. The village collective’s enterprise cannot be the Village Party Secretary’s decision alone. Keep planting, keep losing money; whether the land lies fallow or is leased back, a smaller loss is still a loss—by no means a lasting strategy. And if the land is not re-leased, chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides will come roaring back. For Meicuntou, in short, ecological farming has no way back.
V. Can an Ecological Village Escape the “Middle Environment” Trap?
The Valley of Villains is the smallest possible sample of a “micro environment”: a subsistence-style farm with no commercial pressure, at the barest possible scale—my little half-acre plot. For now, everything is looking good: self-sufficient, the gate shut, facing the sky as we please, with prospects to look forward to year by year. But herbicides are a constant, unpredictable threat. They spray them on the road right nearby, and in the adjacent field too—abandoned for over a decade, and still someone comes along to spray it.
Zou Jinyan, the farmer I introduced to Fan Hanquan, has sixty or seventy mu of forest, twenty-odd mu of cultivated land, and a hundred-mu family farm whose environment and management are gradually coming into their stride. What keeps Jinyan up at night are the large-scale vegetable plots on the perimeter. Fujian summers are scorching, and the hottest months are the off-season for vegetables, but thanks to the altitude here, there is no extreme heat; meanwhile the big vegetable farms in the surrounding areas go all in with chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, the full chemical package.
Another friend, Sister Huang, is over at the Valley of Idlers in Jiaoyang, Shanghang—hundreds of mu of arable land plus several hundred more of forest. She bought a full set of heavy machinery—subsoiler, bulldozer, shredder—and built that vast valley into a kingdom of her own. But every time I visit, she is in a fight. It is not that Sister Huang is confrontational; it is that people keep showing up to stir trouble and extract concessions. Many locals see a big slice of fat meat and all want a bite… It is not just individuals scheming to grab a piece of the pie—even the township and village authorities try to muscle in. If Sister Huang were not naturally tough and well-versed in the law, she would have been driven out long ago.
The Valley of Villains is a pocket-sized farm with a land investment in the tens of thousands of yuan; Jinboyuan runs into the millions, and the Valley of Idlers into the tens of millions—each sustainable in its own right. Yet however idyllic the “micro environment” behind closed doors, every one of them faces its own “middle-environment” predicament.
I harbour no illusions about the macro environment. Industrial agriculture is unstoppable, but not everyone is willing to board the fast lane of the times—Sister Huang, Jinyan and myself, for instance. A good era is one in which everyone has a choice, and can find a “middle environment” in which to feel at home.
In Fan Hanquan’s telling, Meicuntou is the best thing since sliced bread, though that comes with a family’s natural lens. To my eye, it is perfectly ordinary. But if it could cultivate the “middle environment” that small ecological farmers need—hard advantages such as freedom from chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides; soft advantages such as a Village Party Secretary like Fan Hanquan—then that ordinariness would cease to be ordinary.
Jinboyuan, whose conditions are comparable, has shown that ecological farming can do more than attract guests to the farm; it can draw people who set change in motion. Many visitors who once came only for a brief summer respite gradually became familiar friends who return every year. A farm-to-table picking experience grew into a whole series of events, from a rice-planting festival to a harvest festival, plus birdwatching, botanical specimen-making, environmental education, mini bonsai… New visitors keep arriving, and old friends grow ever more devoted. Later Jinyan brought in the Dawu Academy, a rural-development collective, and Xiamen’s “Small but Beautiful” Action School, adding yet more content. They in turn drew still more people, and villagers began opening guesthouses and offering hospitality.
The reason I urged Fan Hanquan to build an “ecological village” was to find people willing to build Meicuntou together. Once you have people, the possibilities that follow become real.
VI. Offering Up One’s Own Land to “Build the Nest and Attract the Phoenix”
Why, when I was hunting for land everywhere, did I never stumble upon Meicuntou?
To be frank, Fan Hanquan is the only Village Party Secretary I have ever befriended. I have always kept Village Party Secretaries at a respectful distance. After decades of grassroots work in public-interest projects and social research, if our two wells simply draw from their own streams without interference, I count myself lucky. It is not that I hold anything against Village Party Secretaries; rather, at the grassroots level the priority is stability, not achievement. A quiet life with no mistakes is the goal, and I can understand their philosophy: “Why borrow trouble when there is less trouble to be had?”
“I am not afraid of trouble. As long as you are willing to come and practise ecological farming, I am willing to provide whatever service I can; as long as you meet the subsidy criteria, we will run around the government departments for you.” Fan Hanquan repeatedly stressed that he would go all out to help newcomers receive the same treatment as locals and access national subsidies. “Once the service is good, people will come, and the village will not go extinct.”
– Meicuntou Village –
◉ Two : Each family receives one mu of land and one room, free of charge for three years. The land is Fan Hanquan’s own field; the room is in the village committee building, with a shared kitchen, bathroom and toilets, broadband, water and electricity—all fully equipped.
◉ Three : If more land is needed, you can lease the already-cleared terraced paddy fields behind the primary school, with water and road access. Rent is capped at 100 yuan per mu.
◉ Four : For lease renewal after three years, land rent is capped at 100 yuan per mu; renting a vacant courtyard home is from 3 yuan per square metre per year, capped at 30 yuan.
◉ Five : If more people wish to come to Meicuntou to practise ecological farming and rent land or rooms, the same capped rates apply.
Finally, a Straight-Talking Recruitment Notice
The first new villager drawn in by this “nest-building” effort—Dr Qin Guoxin, with more than ten years of farming experience—has already settled in Meicuntou. Two more free land-and-housing places remain. We are looking for kindred spirits who dream of ecological farming to help build an ecological village together. If you are interested, contact him directly: 18959029392 (phone or WeChat).
Editor: Wang Hao