"Cao County is on fire, you haven't heard of 666?" In mid-May, the best hotel in the county was once full, and the chef picked up his mobile phone to "show off" his work in Cao County with his friends.
There is a free bus parked in front of the hotel, and if you take a lap around the county seat, you will see pale yellow old buildings, newly built parks and many real estate under construction, small tricycles selling milk are circulating advertising slogans, ginza mall and RT-Mart are the largest shopping malls in the city.
Old men and women playing mahjong sat on the edge of Nanhu Park, and they did not disperse until nightfall. The stalls of the night market were bustling with activity, and on the fence by the lake in the park, someone scribbled with a black pen, and it was written crookedly on it" "Rise of Cao County".
Ask about Cao County's "rise code", locals will suggest that you go to the north of Zhuangzhai Town, where the export of coffins accounts for 90% of the Japanese market; or to the south of The Big Market Town, which is the country's largest production of performance costumes, and a third of the country's Hanfu also comes from here.
These industries have long existed, but the local video anchor's phrase "Shandong Heze Cao County 666" has made more people pay attention to this small county in southwest Lu.
After the sudden explosion, all kinds of media, tourists and visitors poured into Cao County, and various exposures brought nearly 5 billion traffic to this small county. On the hottest day, Hou Zhengliang, the mayor of Daji Town, received more than 20 media.
Caoxian people have also begun to think newly, upgrading traditional industries, attracting more talents to return to their hometowns, and making Caoxian "a lasting fire".
Out of the loop
"Why is the pipe on fire, first change the name of the store"
Cao County suddenly caught fire, and even the locals felt "inexplicable".
"I'd rather sleep in a bed in Cao County than buy a suite in Shanghai." From April 13 to May 17, Weibo read more than 500 million people about Cao County.
In mid-May, the best hotels in the county were full, with media people from all over the country. The government set up a special group to receive the media, and Hou Zhengliang, the mayor of Daji Town, was busy from morning to night, and at most he had to receive more than 20 media a day.
After the hotel chef rested, he took his mobile phone and said to his friend: "Cao County is on fire, 666 you have not heard of?" The chef at the buffet was frying steak and looked up at the customer and asked, "How did you get to Cao County?" "I'm asking a friend to get a pass," the other person replied, smiling on his face.
Fan Qunying, who sells steamed buns online on May 23. Beijing News reporter Wu Caiqian photographed
Fan Qunying, the owner of a steamed bun shop in Daji Town, sells Shandong steamed buns online, and the name of the shop is "Fan Qunying is good."
On May 19, his daughter, who was attending college in a foreign country, suddenly said to him: "Our Cao County is on fire, do you know?" Fan Qunying was puzzled, and then asked: "I don't know, why is it on fire?" The daughter replied: "Why are you on fire, first change the name of the store."
According to her daughter's suggestion, Fan Qunying added the word "Cao County" to the name of the online store. "The conversion rate has really become higher, for example, there are 100 people browsing our online store, and before only 10 people could place orders to buy, now it has become 15."
There are also many stories of Cao County's wealth circulating on the Internet.
The owner of a coffin shop searched for his daughter's relatives, asked for a bachelor's degree or above, preferably fluent in English and Japanese, and hoped that the other party would accept living in Cao County. When mentioning his own conditions, he indicated that he had been operating e-commerce in the village for more than 10 years, and there were 8 online stores, all of which were handed over to his daughter and son-in-law in the future, and the total value of the dowry was estimated to be more than 7 million yuan.
For many years, Cao County has been a poor county.
With a population of 1.75 million, Cao County is the most populous county in Shandong Province and a major labor export county. According to the data, in 2005, Cao County exported 200,000 rural laborers, which means that for every 500 or 600 school-age laborers, only 45 are idle at home.
Writer Wei Xin is also from Cao County. He once mentioned that he studied desperately just to leave, and for more than ten years, he always felt that time and space were stagnant when he returned to his hometown: "The outside world is changing with each passing day, and every time I go back, the county town is still only those poor streets and alleys, like a few strips of black tape sticking horizontally and vertically on the wall, motionless." ”
In the past ten years, the changes in Cao County have still surprised Wei Xin. From 2010 to 2020, Cao County's GDP rose from 12.2 billion to 46.38 billion, and the ranking in Shandong Province quickly increased from 108 to 55, ranking at the forefront of Heze City.
Workers process cloth coffins at a coffin factory in Cao County on May 24. Beijing News reporter Wu Caiqian photographed
Rich
The coffin is exported to Japan, and the manufacturer's annual sales volume is hundreds of millions of yuan
When asked about the road to prosperity in Cao County, locals will mostly suggest that you go to Zhuangzhai Town to see, which is the earliest place known to Cao County.
The town is no more than an hour's drive from the county seat, and the road is lined with paulownia trees. At that time, Jiao Yulu planted a large area of paulownia in Lankao County in order to control sand, and the neighboring Cao County was also the best place to grow paulownia due to suitable water resources and climatic conditions.
The town exports 90% of the Japanese market for coffins.
According to Japanese funeral customs, the body and the coffin are cremated together, so light and flammable wood is required, and the locally produced paulownia has a short growth period, a relatively light texture and is moisture-resistant, making it the first choice for making Japanese coffins.
Tian Liang's father switched from wood processing to coffin manufacturing in 2000 and is now one of the three major coffin manufacturers in Zhuangzhai.
In mid-May, different types of coffins were neatly arranged in the noisy factory buildings, including wooden coffins carved with dragons and phoenixes, as well as cloth coffins embroidered with cherry blossoms, and a plastic "window" was left on the coffins for relatives and friends to visit the remains, and workers were stepping up their work.
Coffins sold to Japan are divided into "wooden coffins" and "cloth coffins", and the price is between a few hundred yuan and a few thousand yuan. Making a Japanese coffin requires more than 200 accessories and more than a dozen processes in the factory, mostly by hand by workers.
Locals also call making coffins "doing happy work". More than a decade ago, it was an obscure job.
"We used to recruit workers, but we didn't dare to say that we made coffins, only that we made crafts." Cai Xiufang remembers that when the workers came to the factory to see that it was a coffin, they immediately turned around and left, and some of them felt afraid and resigned after working for a few days. Some truck drivers have delivered goods once, but they can't sleep for three days and refuse to come again.
Cai Xiufang has a number of coffin manufacturing plants. In 2017, an episode of the Japanese variety show "Incredible World" entered Cao County, and the coffin factory in the lens was the Yunlong Wood Carving Company founded by Cai Xiufang.
Today, Cai Xiufang's factory has three or four hundred employees.
On May 24, a coffin factory in Cao County carved a wooden coffin of phoenix peony. Beijing News reporter Wu Caiqian photographed
To test whether the coffin floor is firm, workers will even lie in the coffin and let others lift the coffin and shake it from side to side. "In our eyes, these coffins are just a work of art, and there is nothing to be afraid of." One worker said so.
Different from the relief carving of coffins in China, Japanese coffins need to be carved separately and pasted on the coffin, and mostly carved dragons and phoenixes and peonies, and machine carving cannot make a smooth effect by hand.
Cai Xiufang began to learn the craft of wood carving at the age of 17. The first time she got into contact with the coffin export business was in 1993, a coffin export company in Cao County was looking for wood carving artists, Cai Xiufang took over the business, and personally designed the pattern, made samples and sent them to Japan.
The customer was very satisfied, and 3,000 coffins were ordered. She brought more than 80 people from various relatives and apprentices to process together, and the houses that could be vacated in the village became "temporary factories", working overtime, and finally completing the order on schedule, and they also opened the coffin processing market.
For Zhuangzhai Town, the coffin is only a subdivision of local wooden products.
As China's largest tung wood processing and production base, 80% of the farmers in the town are engaged in the wood industry, more than 600 local wood processing enterprises, there are more than 2,000 households, more than 60,000 employees, involving furniture, wine boxes, tea boxes and many other wooden products.
According to the data provided by the town, the annual output value of Zhuangzhai is 50 billion yuan, which is almost equivalent to the economic volume of a county in the central region. The town's annual wood processing capacity is 3 million cubic meters, and if stacked up by the size of a football field, it is as high as the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai.
In addition to coffins, local wooden products are also sold abroad in large quantities.
Cai Xiufang mentioned that most of the children of local manufacturers will study in Japan and study trade-related majors. Her son, Li Zilei, returned to his hometown after studying in Japan for four years. "The annual sales revenue of the factory is hundreds of millions, and when I retire, the baton will still be passed to my son."
On May 23, Dinglou Village in Daji Town ushered in the "evening peak". Beijing News reporter Wu Caiqian photographed
Opportunity
Catch the internet express train and go from Taobao shop to Taobao Town
The second largest industry in Cao County is garment processing, which is mainly distributed in Daji Town in the south of the county seat.
Hou Zhengliang, mayor of Daji Town, mentioned that in the early years of the town, there were businessmen operating studio costumes, and in 2015, with the wave of e-commerce, the production and sales of local performance costumes flourished.
On May 20, the reporter followed the interview team to The Big Market Town.
Leading to Daji Town is a spacious cement road, and at the entrance of the town, a red arched sign is crossed above the road, and the big golden characters on it shine in the sun: "Welcome to The Daji of China's Taobao Town".
Embroidery, accessories, buttons, shoes, costumes... As can be seen from the names of the shops on both sides of the road, the costumes here have formed a complete industrial chain. At the end of May, many people will be busy from the morning to the early morning, looking for sources, receiving orders, packaging, etc., and 27 logistics companies are racing against the clock to ship.
Ren Qingsheng, the village secretary of Dinglou Village, was the first person in Daji Town to do e-commerce.
In the past many years, Daji Town was still a "ghost village" without street lights and full of earthen houses, most of the young people went out to work, and Ren Qingsheng was also working as a construction worker in Beijing, Zhengzhou and other places. In 2000, he returned to his hometown to work as an electrician, and his salary was only 130 yuan per month.
His wife, Wang Aihua, works in a photo studio in Dinglou Village. At that time, there was a boss in the village who was making photo studio costumes all year round, mainly picking people on his shoulders and transporting the finished clothes to various cities for sale. The women in the village helped her with the processing of clothing, and gradually mastered the skills of cutting and sewing, and more and more people worked alone.
In 2009, Wang Aihua accidentally heard a classmate talk about selling things in an online store, and she discussed with her husband to buy a computer. Ren Qingsheng disagreed, he once did a pyramid scheme with a friend, and the money was lost, "I thought that the online store was another kind of pyramid scheme."
At the repeated insistence of his wife, Ren Qingsheng agreed. Wang Aihua went back to his mother's house and borrowed 1,000 yuan, and cobbled together 1,400 yuan to buy a computer. At that time, planting an acre of crops only earned five or six hundred yuan a year, and the family's income from farming was less than 2,000 yuan.
On May 22, Ren Qingsheng's performance costume processing company. Beijing News reporter Wu Caiqian photographed
After the computer was bought back, Ren Qingsheng and his wife made trouble. Faced with a desktop with only 1G of memory, they didn't know how to operate and couldn't type. "Shandong dialect has a heavy accent, according to the pronunciation can not be typed", Ren Qingsheng found his daughter's first-grade textbook, chinese characters marked with pinyin. He followed the textbook, and one finger slowly tapped on the keyboard, opening the door of e-commerce.
The couple's online store welcomed its first "big business" in 2010.
A school teacher asked him if he could make costumes, and he looked at the pictures sent by the other party and thought, "Simple, just process it." But he did not sell performance clothes, and did not know the price, so he quoted a unit price of 60 yuan. Finally sold 36 sets, net profit of more than 100 yuan.
"At that time, I thought that the costume was more profitable than the studio costume", Ren Qingsheng found some pictures of the costume on the Internet and uploaded them to his online store. As long as there is a customer to place an order, he will make it according to the picture. In the first year, he earned six or seven thousand yuan, which was three or four times the income from planting crops.
Ren Qingsheng did not know that his actions involved infringement and did not understand Taobao's complaint mechanism. One day, he found that his shop could not be opened, and he realized that he had been complained about because of his infringement. "If you are complained about 6 times, you will close the store, and one will be in 1999." After that, Ren Qingsheng began to look for villagers and children to be models, and uploaded them to the store after taking pictures.
In 2012, Ren Qingsheng earned 70,000 to 80,000 yuan, bought a van, and became the first person in Dinglou Village to get rich.
Villagers have also started e-commerce, and every door is piled with cloth for clothes. The government staff does not understand e-commerce, only saw the fire hazards, "Dinglou Village does not know what it is doing, fancy, it seems to be quite profitable."
Su Yongzhong, then secretary of the party committee of Daji Township, keenly felt that this was an opportunity of the times, and he set up an e-commerce development office to renovate roads and transform power grids...
The first batch of villagers who became rich built houses and factories on farmland, but faced the dilemma of illegally occupying cultivated land. The leaders of the county came to the village to inspect, saw the houses built indiscriminately, and angrily scolded: "Illegal occupation, the development of the big market town is not good!" ”
The newly built brick houses were demolished by hook machines, and the town began to prepare for the construction of a Taobao industrial park. The industrial park is built in the north, and the villagers of Dinglou Village in the south are not willing to move in, first, they do not want to leave the fertile soil of entrepreneurship, and second, they are worried about the prospects of the industrial park.
"We spent a long time doing the ideological work of merchants, taking measures such as tax breaks." Hou Zhengliang remembers that at that time, they first invited some larger enterprises to settle in, and then slowly led other merchants to enter the industrial park and opened the road of large-scale production.
In the "List of Top 100 Taobao Counties in 2020" released by Ali Research Institute, Cao County ranked second in the country with the number of 17 Taobao towns and 151 Taobao villages, and the second largest Taobao village cluster in the country after Yiwu.
In Dinglou Village, which first became rich, "North to Guangcao" may not be a joke. According to Pear Video, in the 2018 "Ranking of Per capita income in all parts of the country", the per capita income of Dinglou Village in Cao County reached 100,000 yuan, which greatly exceeded that of the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. There are 336 households in the village, and there are 350 vehicles, many of which are luxury cars, and two fire trucks.
May 23, Hanfu Experience Hall in Cao County. Beijing News reporter Wu Caiqian photographed
transformation
More than 600 Hanfu enterprises, trying to go from cottages to original brands
Cao County, which has repeatedly seized the wind, is also facing new challenges and opportunities.
According to statistics, there are more than 600 Hanfu processing enterprises in Caoxian County, and in 2019, the sales of Caoxian Hanfu were nearly 1.9 billion yuan, of which 1.3 billion yuan came from Daji Town, and the town mainly did affordable Hanfu, and the price was generally between 100 yuan and 300 yuan.
Merchants mainly switched from making costumes. Affected by the epidemic last year, many domestic performance activities were suspended, and the performance service market was once suspended. Merchants in Cao County had to find another way out, coinciding with the rise of the Hanfu wind, and they began to enter the Hanfu track.
"We have a mature garment industry chain, turn into Hanfu, only need one import on the line." Some merchants also mentioned that some people in the town have long been doing Hanfu, and later because of the impact of the epidemic, a large number of merchants have begun to seize the Hanfu market.
Compared with the performance costume, the regulation and aesthetic requirements of Hanfu are higher, and the production process is more complicated. The lack of local designers has left the Hanfu manufacturers in Daji Town helpless in design.
They had to outsource the design work or borrow elements of other products, which also involved copycat and quality issues, so they were criticized by insiders, and even some companies brought a team of lawyers to Cao County to fight a lawsuit.
"Some merchants have a weak sense of copyright, and when they see a good design, they can use it directly," Hou Zhengliang said, in order to enhance the legal awareness of villagers, government staff have carried out a number of legal lectures, and also encouraged enterprises to add legal studios.
Some merchants are also aware that original brands can win the market. In 2015, Meng Xiaoxia, a girl from Inner Mongolia, came to Daji to start a business, and her husband Hu Chunqing, a local, was still studying for a doctorate in Dalian.
"Shandong people love face, and my family thinks that when I come back to do Taobao, it is a waste of academic qualifications." At the beginning of the business, Meng Xiaoxia could not understand Shandong dialect, and the business did not go so smoothly. The opposition of her family also made her feel pressured. But she didn't care, silently holding her breath, still busy with the purchase, ordering, and shipping every day, "before success, we don't want to make a sound."
Hu Chunqing also returned to Daji Town 4 years ago. The identity of "doctoral student" has brought convenience to his entrepreneurship, and the government has found them a "poverty alleviation workshop" and set up a "doctoral studio" in the county, and various policies and subsidies are also slightly inclined. With the advantage of studying art, Meng Xiaoxia has unique ideas in the design and production of clothes, and leads the villagers to explore the new direction of this industry.
On May 22, an anchor in Cao County was live streaming clothes sales. Beijing News reporter Wu Caiqian photographed
Dilemma
Labor shortage, "young children want to run out"
This sudden popularity, CaoXian people harvested traffic, but also opened a new thinking.
"Do you need a pass to Go to Cao County", in late May, Meng Xiaoxia's online store often received private messages from some customers, because the place of delivery is Cao County, and the attention and sales of the store have increased.
Li Zilei also happened to catch up with the "wind outlet".
The cloud live broadcasting platform he founded was launched in May, opening the form of online live streaming with goods. In the large warehouse, some brands of clothes are neatly hung on the shelves, and dozens of anchors are holding clothes on the live broadcast. In recent days, some people in the live broadcast room have been commenting "Are you from Cao County" and "Cao County 666", and the traffic has also increased. Some bloggers have been broadcasting live for 27 consecutive hours in order to seize the opportunity.
"I hope to provide ritual funeral services for the Chinese people", the last time it became popular, let many Japanese people know about the Yunlong wood carving, Li Zilei hopes to seize this opportunity to open the domestic market, he registered several trademarks, and is planning to start with pet coffins and domestic funeral homes.
Hou Zhengliang preliminarily counted that under the reports of many media, the exposure traffic of Cao County this time was about 5 billion person-times.
But "North to Guangcao" is only a joke after all. Liang Huimin, the county magistrate of Cao County, also mentioned in an interview with the media that Cao County is incomparable with these big cities.
Compared with the "star townships" of Zhuangzhai and Daji, other townships in Cao County also have some agricultural product processing and sales industries, but they are not "out of the circle".
There are 7 highways in Cao County, which are half an hour's drive from Heze Peony Airport. However, the high-speed rail in the county town will not be opened until next year, and from Beijing to Cao County, you can only take a train to Heze City, and then change trains to Cao County.
County magistrate Liang Huimin once mentioned that in recent years, more than 3,000 college students, including doctoral students and international students, have come to Cao County to start a business. But this figure cannot meet the needs of Cao County's development.
Zhuangzhai and Daji also have the problem of labor shortage. Ren Qingsheng said that he has 4 factories and more than 100 workers, "Now the surrounding villages are doing e-commerce, we are more and more difficult to recruit, can only go to other surrounding counties and cities to recruit people." ”
Cai Xiufang is more worried that fewer and fewer people are doing wood carving. "Now even if it is free to teach, many young people are not willing to learn." Meng Xiaoxia has the same worry, "There are people who have returned home, but there is still a shortage of employees, and young children still can't do it, and they all want to run out." ”
In order to attract entrepreneurs who have returned to their hometowns, a series of preferential policies have been formulated.
For example, the house is sold at cost price; the Rural Commercial Bank has 300,000, 500,000, and 1 million different amounts for college students, master's students, and doctoral students, who do not need mortgages or guarantees, and can apply directly from mobile phones for house purchases, entrepreneurship, etc.
County Magistrate Liang Huimin is still full of hope. She mentioned in an interview with the Beijing News reporter that although Cao County cannot be compared with large cities, the environment here is very good, the cost of living is very low, and it is very convenient to return to Cao County to start a business, live and work. "A lot of young men who have returned from the north to Guangshen told me that they feel that this place belongs to them."
Beijing News reporter Wu Caiqian intern Huang Qifeng
Edited by Zuo Yanyan
Proofread by Yang Xuli