The sun is always red; Chairman Mao is the dearest.
Thirty years after the Cultural Revolution ended, songs and slogans lauding late Chinese leader Mao Zedong still resound in Dazhai, a village in the backwater of China's northern Shanxi Province and icon of rural development under Mao-era planned economy.
Such attractions of legacy, along with modern hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops built in traditional cave dwellings, remain landmarks of the model village and bring in more than 300, 000 tourists and 4 million yuan (US$513,000) of tourism income a year.
Last year, Dazhai, with a population of 500 and covering less than two square kilometers, reported a per capita net income of 7, 000 yuan (US$900), nearly twice the national average of 3,587 yuan (US$460) for Chinese farmers in the same period.
In three years, the figure is expected to top 10,000 yuan (US$1, 282), said Guo Fenglian, female leader of the village locked in the Taihang Mountains.
Guo was reputed as an "iron girl" in the 1960s for leading her fellow farmers to fight poor natural conditions and score outstanding grain yields. Mao made Dazhai a model of rural development for other Chinese villages to follow. "In agriculture, learn from Dazhai," he said. Nearly ten million people from China and abroad visited the farm in the nationwide campaign.
The Utopian village suffered a ten-year recession after the Cultural Revolution in 1976, but thrived again amid the nationwide drive to build a socialist market economy and new countryside.
When a mature Guo attended the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Beijing in 2002, she brought about a clear message: Mao's model village no more relied on farming.
Guo, secretary of the CPC Dazhai village committee, has led the villagers to set up numerous businesses involved in garment, cement, food and beverage, coal mining, transportation and trade. The Dazhai walnut juice has become a name brand nationwide.
The landmark terraced fields, once a prototype for rural development, have been returned to forests to maintain harmony between man and nature.
In the near future, the village will establish a 30-million- yuan (US$3.8 million) plant to produce bio-fuel out of sorghum and cassava, said Guo.
Local businesses are making 5 million yuan (US$641,000) annually in the past five years, enabling villagers to enjoy better social welfare than the rest of China's 900 million rural people: free education at kindergartens and primary schools, a monthly pension of more than 100 yuan (US$13) for people aged over 60, cash rewards for college students and a medical insurance benefiting all the villagers.
The village as a collective still keeps a reserve of fund to improve infrastructure, avoid yawning income gap and seek continuous development in a more "scientific manner", she said.
"We should seek truth from facts and emancipate our minds -- General Secretary Hu Jintao makes a very good point there," Guo said of the 17th CPC National Congress slated to open on Monday, although she is not a delegate to the Party congress this time.
"Who says Dazhai is not allowed to seek reform and economic development as everyone else?" she said, refuting criticism that the locals' endeavors to make profits have "diluted" the so-called "Dazhai spirit."
"The Dazhai spirit remains unchanged: in the hardest days we relied on ourselves and fought with all the hardships to achieve the impossible; today we need to carry forward the legacy," Guo said.
(Xinhua News Agency October 14, 2007)
