Junior high school girls weave bamboo mats and sell them to Europe and Japan.

Original title: small bamboo strips weave dreams of becoming rich

Xu Donglian is drying bamboo mats. Photo taken by our reporter Liu Xing

In early winter, Huatanshan Town, Shangrao County, Jiangxi Province, is covered with mountains and forests. In front of the simple factory building of Hengzhen Bamboo Company, bamboo mats rolled into cylinders are arranged neatly in the sun. In the factory building, thousands of bamboo are piled into a "bamboo mountain", sawing bamboo, breaking strips and weaving, and each process is in good order. Xu Donglian, the 45-year-old head of the company, was busy with the workers. In a few minutes, a new bamboo mat "spit" out of the "mouth" of the weaving machine.

Despite the fact that Hengzhen bamboo industry is not large in scale, its output is not small. The company produces more than 6000 bamboo mats every day, with an annual output value of more than 20 million yuan. "with the help of large bamboo enterprises in Zhejiang and Anhui provinces, we have spread Shangrao's bamboo mats on cars and high-speed railways, as well as sold them to Japan and Europe." Xu Donglian's words are not without pride.

Xu Donglian has only a junior high school education. In 1989, she dropped out of school to work in Guangdong because of her poor family. Two years later, with the 30,000 yuan she saved frugally, she opened a restaurant in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province. "in Wenzhou, I saw that several local bamboo companies are doing particularly well." Xu Donglian is a person who is good at capturing business opportunities: my hometown is covered with bamboo forests. I can also do bamboo business. In 1996, Xu Donglian made a special trip to Longyou, Zhejiang to learn the cutting, visual grading, bamboo strips processing and weaving technology of Phyllostachys pubescens. After that, she returned to Huatan Mountain to set up a bamboo processing factory and earned 30,000 yuan in her first year. Subsequently, she bought more than a dozen special processing machines, so that the output increased rapidly.

Due to the good quality of products, more than a dozen large bamboo companies have established cooperative relations with her, and the company's sales have continued to grow. "our bamboo mats are sent to upstream enterprises for secondary processing to make all kinds of high-standard reorganized plates, which are in short supply in domestic and foreign markets." Xu Donglian said.

In order to help villagers get rich together, with the support of the local government, Xu Donglian established a Fubang bamboo professional cooperative in Shangrao County, attracting more than 400 local and surrounding villagers and poor people to join. Xu Donglian helps you choose and purchase equipment, train processing technology, unify sales channels, and make the local bamboo processing industry prosperous. Under her leadership, Huatanshan Town set up nearly 100 bamboo processing plants (sites), and a number of "small bosses" and skilled craftsmen of the bamboo industry emerged. Disabled Zheng Deyou bought a weaving machine to process bamboo mats with the assistance of Xu Donglian, and his family's monthly income exceeded 8000 yuan. The family factory of Xie Jishui, a former poor family, processed 100000 bamboo mats a year, with an annual income of nearly 200000 yuan.

The growing popularity of rural tourism in recent years has made Xu Donglian have the idea of diversified operation. Processing bamboo handicrafts, setting up farm music, and excavating the tourism specialties of her hometown are all included in her next development goals. "I just want to do my best to help more villagers get rich." Xu Donglian said. (author: Liu Xing)