By Heartmenders Magazine Content Staff
Huaxi is a village in East China’s Jiangsu province where all the villagers are extremely rich. It was founded in 1961 as a poor village that had depended on farming. By the 90s, a visionary man named Wu Renbao initiated the village’s transformation, industrializing it. He established 12 big corporations and a stock market excellently managed by the locals. And recently, they are expanding into hospitality and tourism, building a mega hotel featuring 74-story towers with molten-gold statues adorning the rooftops. There were many other magnificent edifices built around the village. Before Wu died in 2013, the village was producing textiles, steel, iron, and other products, exporting mainly to more than 40 countries. Each year, they accumulate billions of dollars in revenue from various business activities conducted within the village—a modernized town unique, in its own special way, from every other town in China.
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Huaxi is a very conservative village. Employing a mixture of communism and capitalism, in its structure, and hence can be better described as a Socialist village, in which the business empires are owned exclusively by the locals, about 2000 of them, and managed by Wu’s children, the village’s transformer. Others who are entitled to live in the village are foreign workers who work 7 days a week but are not regarded as locals. About 25,000 people who work in different branches of the mammoth business adventures of the village owners are paid good salaries. Still, they do not share the corporations’ benefits or profits with the main locals. Whoever loses their job leaves and is no longer eligible to live there. Every year, the 2000 members of this village, who are the collective owners of the village’s corporations, each receive about 250,000 US dollars from the corporations’ proceeds. They don’t pay for healthcare and live in free housing.
Huaxi mansions. Photo credit: DocumentaryTube
For those dreaming of becoming indigenes of this village, nothing was made as hard as obtaining a legal permanent resident of this dwelling, which continues to limit the number of people who are bona fide members of this exclusive village. Unfortunately, if any villagers decide to leave the village, they cannot take their assets with them. Accordingly, the assets are made and enjoyed only in Huaxi and are never to be taken out.
In Huaxi, the people live in modern mansions, and the locals, the main villagers, who own the corporations, are very fashionable, with good eating habits and a vast menu of highly nutritious dishes. Still, there are no nightclubs, no bars, no karaoke restaurants, and no internet clubs in this village. Drug use has been banned and gambling outlawed. The locals are forbidden to grant interviews to foreign journalists; though very receptive and kind to tourists, who, according to official reports, had put their numbers in the millions, trooped into this area in China every year.
Huaxi village, where no residents are poor but have a dictated lifestyle. Photo credit: Business Insider
Are you thinking about visiting this village, where no resident is poor, to see for yourself what it takes to live a life of affluence, but one that is curtailed or stymied? You would find out it wasn’t a waste after all, when you’d see a deliberate replication of famous Western edifices, like America’s Empire Building, besides the replication of China’s Great Wall, enjoying a superb gaze and world-class hospitality, in this small village.
Standing tall is the mega Huaxi hotel, which lodges thousands of tourists. Photo credit: China Daily
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