@samuelszuchan: Sun Haowen failed twice in his attempt to leave Huaxi, China's richest village, and lost nearly one million yuan in total. The Jiangsu village's wealth came from its factories. In 1969, Wu Renbao, the party secretary, secretly relocated 20 villagers to a hardware workshop in a secluded spot, and in three years, its production matched agricultural output in the village. Since the factories were collectively owned by the village, Wu designed a profit distribution system to ensure that wealth would stay within Huaxi. In 1985, each villager was asked to chip in 2,000 yuan. After that, just 20 percent of a villager's bonus would be paid in cash, and the other 80 percent would be tallied as shares that could not be redeemed for cash. The profits eventually snowballed into the massive conglomerate Huaxi Group, mostly focused on steel manufacturing. In 2003, a Southern Weekend reporter found Sun back in the village and learned that over the past few decades, fewer than five people had succeeded in leaving. According to the internal covenant of the village, if anyone left or quit working at a village company, they would lose their home, bonus and dividends. For example, in 2008, Gong Qingfeng moved his family into a villa, and the village set the price of the villa at 2.08 million yuan, payable at 208,000 yuan per year, called "rental fee." Since his shares generated about 200,000 yuan a year, nearly all of it would go to the village as rent before he could see a cent. Then in 2021, the dividends ceased and the village took back the original share certificates. In 2023, it sold 80 percent of Huaxi Group to a state fund in Jiangyin for one yuan, transferring the steel business to the city government. When Phoenix News summarized the villagers' situation, they called it "thirty years of work, a million on the ledger zeroed overnight."

Sam Szuchan

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Friday 25 September 2026 19:00:00 GMT