Pursuing a Great Leap Forward

When it comes to economic growth, the world’s most populous country has two faces.

Coastal China is a wizard of progress. Inland China is a creature of the past.

This developmental deformity is a legacy of the late “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping, who famously declared that “to get rich is glorious”--but who let some people get rich before others by introducing market forces along the nation’s Pacific coast.

As a result, here in Luoxun, a dirt-poor county in the landlocked southern province of Guizhou, county chiefs, village leaders, department heads and police captains have headed off for sabbaticals lasting two years or more in the freewheeling provinces of Guangdong and Zhejiang. They’ve become print shop apprentices, air-conditioning repairmen, assembly line workers and entrepreneurs. But unlike the millions of migrant laborers flooding to coastal cities for better jobs, these cadres of the Communist Party have a much loftier goal: to learn survival skills in the market economy and then go back and lead their hometowns out of poverty.

It may seem naive to imagine that such low-skill contact could turn anyone into a miracle worker. But the Luoxun program’s very existence underscores just how wide the schism between coastal and inland China has become since the reform era began two decades ago.

At no other time in the half a century of Communist rule has the contrast that resulted from uneven development been so stark. And at no other time has it been more imperative that rank-and-file party leaders take the plunge to close the gap.

“For too long, we locked ourselves up in a self-imposed prison,” Luoxun county’s party secretary, Teng Juiming, said recently. “East coast people dare to cross the ocean to learn from foreigners. We need the guts to walk out of the mountains and into the school of life in the more developed areas.”

In the past five years, hundreds of cadres under age 35 have been sent from Luoxun to da gong, a catch phrase for making a living away from the traditional social safety net. About 80% have returned to take up key posts in the local economy.

Their journeys are the flip side of treks made during the notorious Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s. Then, the educated elite were forced to seek re-education from the proletariat--often in the countryside. Now the Communists choose to humble themselves before fledgling capitalists.

It’s a do-or-die situation.

Guizhou province, which lies about 400 miles northwest of Hong Kong, is the poorest in China. Nearly 90% of the land is mountainous. A third of the villages are not accessible by road. Illiteracy is close to 70%. The region is rich in natural resources, especially minerals, but there is little infrastructure to bring them to the marketplace. The severe lack of transportation and communications capability has sealed the locals in isolation and ignorance.

As coastal China transformed itself into an avatar of growth, this rugged terrain sank like dead weight, until the bureaucrats realized they were part of the problem.

Even though the county could hardly afford to pay existing personnel, every year hundreds of Guizhou residents who completed higher education came home expecting government jobs that didn’t exist. So in 1995, local officials began experimenting with sending younger cadres away.

The experiment served two purposes: to give the future leaders some exposure to new ideas and to save the county about $120,000 a year in wages that could be put to work elsewhere.

The benefits far exceeded officials’ expectations.

“In these last three years, we developed faster than the previous 50,” said Teng, the party secretary, who was county chief when the program started.

That progress is sometimes as intangible as a new state of mind.

Yu Xueqiang, a former county party boss, remembers the listlessness that plagued the leadership when he arrived in Luoxun in the early 1990s.

His staff came to meetings late. When they did show up, they wore bedroom slippers and sloppy shorts. What could have been accomplished in half a day took three. Working meant sipping tea, smoking cigarettes and reading the People’s Daily.

For these workers, sojourns in the east became embarrassing wake-up calls as they observed the behavior of their counterparts in the new economy.

“Twenty years ago, the difference between us and them was minimal,” said Yu, who came up with the idea of sending cadres east. “Then the rest of China changed. Some of our people went out there and realized they had never seen an elevator before and didn’t know how to operate the hot and cold faucets in the hotel.”

Even those with a college education were in for a big culture shock.

Luo Shihui had been deputy director at a local factory. In Shenzhen, a special economic zone next to Hong Kong, the only job he could find was packing boxes in the basement of a print shop for 14 hours a day.

The competitive environment made him tap potential he didn’t know he had. He began to think of how to market himself and take initiative. Soon he leaped to executive assistant. Every night, he wrote in his journal, detailing management skills and general impressions he had collected during the day.

When the 36-year-old came home to Luoxun two years ago, he was promoted to director of his old workplace. To encourage higher productivity, he made his employees shareholders of the company. He also tied pay to performance. He offered high wages to attract outside experts. He built child-care facilities and new dorms. He let substandard employees walk.

“If I can’t change the face of my entire village, I can at least change the face of my factory,” Luo said as he surveyed the facility’s primitive surroundings in his preppy shirt and tie and clean khakis. A cluster of village children followed him, raggedy clothes on their backs and envy in their eyes.

Another local boy made good is Zeng Xingtie, 37. The clean-cut bureaucrat was thrown into a custodial job at a plastics factory in Wenzhou, in Zhejiang province just south of Shanghai. The experience taught him to fight his way up from the bottom rather than accept his lot.

“Out here in the west, we are very dependent on government help and direction,” Zeng said. “We always want to test the water first. Try the temperature. Think about it. In Wenzhou, they are more willing to take a risk.”

That spirit now guides him at his new posting as head of the local animal husbandry administration. Under him, passing the buck has become a financial liability. Veterinarians are now paid according to how many animals survive under their care. Abruptly, the death rate among sick pigs plunged from 2.8% a year to 0.4%. For the first time in its history, the agency registered positive returns. Also for the first time, the best caretakers had the chance to triple their incomes.

The Luoxun skills program is now so popular that young cadres clamor for the chance to work out of town. The county had to set up a quota system to avoid an exodus.

Luo Xianhui, the head of one of Luoxun’s hamlets, says the average annual income for a family of five or six in his village is a puny $120, about an eighth of what a family earns in a large coastal city. For as long as Luo can remember, his villagers have often been forced to hike for days through the mountains that surround them to borrow food from neighbors who have had better harvests. The shame finally ended recently, and Luo knows he had a hand in it.

After coming back from Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, Luo was elected village chief and began doing things the elders wouldn’t have dreamed of. With three years of city experience under his belt and technical expertise gained from performing industrial air-conditioning maintenance, Luo convinced the villagers to build a concrete road that connects their fields to the local highway. Equipment and supplies previously hauled on foot and by horse-drawn wagon now arrive by the truckload. This has saved growers time and money and boosted productivity.

“There is definitely a generation gap between those who left and those who stayed,” Luo said as he sat beneath a giant oak tree in front of a new school built under his administration. His village also became the first in the county to put up street lights and start a radio station.

Counties throughout the province and beyond are now adopting the da gong program, hoping to turn more cadres into bridge builders to the future.

“We may be economically backward, but our mind-set can’t be backward,” said Yu, the former county head. “People can drive the economy forward. Otherwise, the east is going to turn into a huge head and we’re going to shrink into a tiny tail.”