Since being elected as a representative of the 14th National People's Congress in 2023, March has become Li Chunyan's busiest month. She carefully attended the agenda of the two sessions during the day, used her break at noon to accept media interviews, and returned to her station at night. There were always more than a dozen missed calls on her mobile phone, each one coming from Emei Village thousands of miles away.
Li Chunyan called back one by one.
On the other end of the phone, villagers asked eagerly: The village organized everyone to plant potatoes last year, and now it is the harvest season. Some villagers called her to ask about prices and sales. This year, the village plans to centrally manage paddy fields and distribute rice seeds uniformly. Some villagers came to recommend varieties that are delicious and easy to sell.
The local handmade specialty Bobaimang bamboo has become a top-notch intangible cultural heritage. First, Yang Mi carried it on the red carpet of the Shanghai International Film Festival, and later an international top luxury brand signed a million-dollar cooperation with it. Orders for Mangzhu knitting suddenly flooded into Emei Village. Some villagers went to the village committee to grab the knitted styles. Villagers who couldn't stand it came to Li Chunyan for "review"…
From a once impoverished village to a model village with prosperous industries, suitable for living and working, in the past six years, Li Chunyan has led the villagers to live a more prosperous life step by step.
This persistence in taking root in the countryside stems from her unchanging original intention. “Going out is not to get rid of poverty, but to learn better knowledge and experience and bring it back to build our hometown.”
Iron-blooded and courageous, using softness to overcome strength
In 1990, Li Chunyan was born in Emei Village, Fengshan Town, Bobai County. This place is located deep in the mountains and life is barren. When she was a child, she rarely wore new clothes. When the laces of a pair of plastic sandals broke, she baked them on a fire and glued them together, and wore them again and again for many years.
In order to get out of the mountains and get rid of poverty, Li Chunyan joined the army in 2007 and became an armed police border guard. During her eight-year military career, she faced danger countless times. When participating in a border mission, she even wrote a suicide note in advance.
After retiring from the army, she returned to Bobai County and founded the Hakka longan brand, supported the processing of longan meat in many villages across the county, and helped hundreds of poor households find employment.
In 2020, Li Chunyan was elected to Emei Village as secretary of the general party branch. At the beginning of taking office, doubts arose one after another. Many elderly people feel that she is young, unmarried, and "cannot control the situation" at all, and they often manually create difficulties for her.
Her first plan was to build a waste transfer station to improve the rural environment. The trash cans installed in the village were said by villagers to "affect Feng Shui"; more than half of the people in the village refused to pay the one yuan a month for garbage removal because "no one throws garbage into the trash cans."
Li Chunyan did not argue. She organized village cadres to stand guard by the trash cans. When they saw villagers who threw garbage in but failed to pay the freight, they asked them to pay. If he still refuses to hand it over, Li Chunyan will put the trash he threw back at his door. This "thunder method" was so effective that the villagers were afraid that she would throw garbage at the door, so they paid the clearing fee one after another.
·Li Chunyan at work. (Photo provided by interviewee)
According to county statistics at the end of the year, Emei Village paid the highest proportion of garbage removal freight in the county. The river that was once littered with garbage and filled with odor has become clear and surrounded by green plants, and Emei Village has become a well-known ecological village.
"Iron fist" is not Li Chunyan's only magic weapon. When resolving neighborhood disputes, she also knows how to overcome toughness with softness. A villager once went to the village committee to report a problem. When she came to mediate, her tone was very rude and said, "If I don't talk to you, you can't solve the problem." Li Chunyan asked the old party secretary to mediate, and she listened and learned at the same time.
A few months later, the villager's wife approached the village committee again and claimed that her neighbor's herbicide had poisoned her rice seedlings. If the village committee did not deal with the problem, it would use dichlorvos to poison the neighbor's geese.
After investigation, Li Chunyan discovered that the seedlings planted by this villager were not damaged by pesticides, but were diseased seedlings that others had picked up and that were unwanted. She specially invited technicians to the villagers' homes to explain on the spot the difference between seedlings poisoned by herbicides and diseased seedlings, completely clearing up misunderstandings between neighbors. Later, she asked around and found remaining healthy seedlings from other villagers' homes, and helped this villager complete the replanting.
Nowadays, the villagers of Emei Village have long regarded Li Chunyan as one of their own. The villagers who once "didn't talk to her" later patted her on the shoulder and said with emotion, "Secretary Li, it would be great if you could always stay in our village."
“Everything is easy to do if you have money”
"Making money" is the word Li Chunyan said most often during the interview. She was born and raised in the countryside, started her own business in the countryside, and being close to farmers for many years has made her understand that all the villagers' disobedience to the work of the village committee is because they are "fearful of poverty."
If the countryside is to be revitalized, industries must be revitalized. Li Chunyan noticed that there is a buffalo milk enterprise in Bobai County, which is developing rapidly and has broad prospects. If a milk buffalo farm is set up in a village, the sale of milk should not be a problem.
In 2021, she resisted the pressure and opened the first milk buffalo breeding farm in the village. After studying with technicians for half a year, I finally figured out a set of successful milk buffalo breeding experience.
·Li Chunyan is milking buffalo. (Photo provided by interviewee)
Since then, more and more villagers have joined the milk and buffalo breeding industry, and some villagers have no principal. Li Chunyan contacted the financial department to open up loan channels for the villagers through village-wide credit and village committee recommendations. At present, there are more than 200 milk buffaloes in the village, bringing tens of thousands of yuan in income to farmers every year.
In addition to specialty breeding, Li Chunyan also led villagers to carry out reforms in the form of investing land management rights in cooperatives, allowing villagers to become "shareholders" and each household to receive dividends. In the first year of dividend distribution, an 80-year-old five-guarantee household came to receive the money on crutches. He said happily: "Secretary Li, I never thought that in this life, in addition to state subsidies, I could also receive industrial dividend money."
The villagers' affirmation made Li Chunyan more determined to expand her ways of "making money". Specialty industries such as bayberry, jackfruit, mango bamboo weaving, and lion head goose are in full swing in Emei Village.
Before Li Chunyan became the village party secretary, the collective income of Emei Village was 50,000 yuan, which increased to 530,000 yuan in 2024 and reached 640,000 yuan in 2025.
"Everything is easy for villagers if they have money. Now that there are so many industries in the village, everyone has no time to gossip about family affairs. They are all working hard to make money with the village." Li Chunyan said with a smile.
The villagers' pockets were bulging, and she turned her attention to cultural construction. There are 13 villages in Emei Village, and each village has built a sports field and cultural square. She also brought women together to form a volunteer service team for environmentally friendly mothers, and invited etiquette teachers to teach them image management, getting along with husband and wife, and educating children.
Members of the village committee also often carry out cultural propaganda among villagers, encouraging the elderly to help young people take care of their children, so that young people can go out to make money without worries; educate young people to respect the elderly, and convey the concept that "it is a kindness for parents to help with their children, and it is their duty not to help with their children." The village regularly conducts selections to showcase women's style, and the village atmosphere is improving step by step.
In Li Chunyan's view, true wealth is not only rich in the pocket, but also rich in spirit. The core goal of rural revitalization is to allow rural areas to have both visible industrial prosperity and tangible spiritual confidence.
Come from the masses, go to the masses
The suggestions brought by Li Chunyan during this year's two sessions are also related to the construction of rural culture.
Nowadays, people everywhere are talking about "cultural shaping cities". Li Chunyan feels that someone should also care about "cultural shaping villages". She said bluntly that there is a huge gap in funding between urban and rural areas in cultural construction. Although many villages have indeed built cultural public places, "if there is no subsequent funding to ensure stable operation, it will eventually become a face-saving project that wastes people and money."
·Li Chunyan visited and surveyed the villagers. ("China People's Congress" magazine)
As a grassroots People's Congress representative, Li Chunyan's suggestions for the Two Sessions have always been from the masses and to the masses.
During the Two Sessions last year, she suggested reducing or exempting urban and rural medical insurance fees for people over 80 years old to reduce the pressure on elderly care, which resonated with netizens. The comment area was full of likes: "Representing the people" and "I hope to adopt your suggestions."
This advice comes from her real experience of visiting villages and households every day. The permanent population of Emei Village is mainly elderly people over 60 years old. The annual medical insurance premium of 400 yuan is a big expense for them. Many villagers hope to reduce the number of years for medical insurance payment.
After reviewing the data on the elderly population in towns and villages across the country, she proposed setting the exemption threshold at 80 years old, taking into account the national fiscal capacity, to make the proposal more feasible.
She also continued to call on relevant departments to visit and see more places in the motherland before formulating policies, and implement local policies based on understanding the differences in the natural environment between the north and the south.
"I have a comrade whose hometown is in Hulunbuir, and his family of three has more than 50 acres of arable land. When I was a child, my family of 7 people only had 1.3 acres of arable land. This is the difference between the north and the south, so many policies must be formulated according to local conditions."
Suggestions come from the grassroots, and services are provided around you. While translating the voices of the masses into actions in performing her duties, she also handled every small matter of people's livelihood in a practical manner and warmed the folks with her considerate service.
After several months of hard work, she took the initiative to help an elderly man in his 60s in the village apply for a new household registration and subsistence allowance. Later, the old man waited for her at the intersection where she went to work every day. When he saw her, he smiled and said, "Fifth sister (Li Chunyan is the fifth in the family), are you coming to work?"
She once visited the house to deliver party membership condolences to old party members who had moved away from the village for many years. After receiving the condolences money, the old man went to the county party committee to praise her. He said that the state has selected a group of good cadres to care for them, old party members.
Faced with the recognition of the masses, Li Chunyan said with emotion: "I just helped them enjoy their due rights, and I got full praise from the masses. Why don't I do good things and do practical things for the villagers?"
·Li Chunyan. (Photo provided by interviewee)
Li Chunyan spends most of the year with the villagers. Her husband not only takes care of the family affairs, but also acts as a driver during holidays to accompany her to deal with emergencies in the village.
Last year, Li Chunyan's husband submitted an application to join the party. There was this sentence in the application: "My lover is a grassroots worker. Every time I see the villagers' small problems solved, every time I see the masses praising my lover, I see the warmest and brightest tomorrow for the party and the country."
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2026 National Two Sessions
