The Dream Maker

In the early 1980s the reform and opening-up policy was in force and the Central Document No. 1 had been issued, and Pingchuan County decided to set up a new town, Yuehai Town, to speed up its own development. The site was a stretch of tidal flats with nothing on it, and there was to be no money from the state. Li Qiu Ping and Zheng De Cheng, two of the county's cadres, took the job on. They held to the line that the people's city is built by the people, and inside the new policies they found a way to do it without government funds, a fund-raising and partnership scheme in which the farmers themselves put up the capital and came in as partners. Thousands of farmers joined. With the other cadres and farmers who were willing to try what had not been tried before, the two of them began putting a modern town up on the mudflats, starting from nothing, and the work changed the look of a poor district and the fortunes of hundreds of thousands of farmers.