Wen Yanwen Li Mengjun
Editor's Note/ When it comes to Wuzhen, people often think of two people. Chen Xianghong often calls himself a "contract foreman", and employees prefer to call him "Director Chen". Chen was born in Wuzhen, and on the first day of the Chinese New Year in 1999, a fire in Wuzhen pulled him back to his hometown. At that time, he was the director of the office of the Tongxiang Municipal Government, and he was sent to Wuzhen to resettle the victims, and after the work, he was officially transferred to Wuzhen to do the protection of the ancient town and tourism development of Wuzhen. Since the establishment of Wuzhen Tourism Company in 1999, they have built the obscure and dying Jiangnan town into a world-famous model of Jiangnan ancient town. After the success of the Wuzhen model, they rushed all the way to build new projects such as Gubei Water Town and Wujiang Village, reaching one new milestone after another.
Mu Xin is a famous writer, painter and poet. In 1994, Mu Xin returned to Wuzhen and wrote the article "Wuzhen" with disappointment and sadness: "In the concept of habit, 'hometown' is the 'most familiar place', and at present I only know the place name, yes, dialect, unchanged, in addition, nothing ... Farewell, I will not come again. In December 1998, the article was published in the media. In 2006, Chen Xianghong invited Mu Xin back to Wuzhen, when Mu Xin was 79 years old. In 2011, Mu Xin died in Wuzhen. In 2015, Muxin Art Museum was established in Wuzhen.
Wuzhen, formerly known as Wudun and Qingdun, has a long history of more than 6,000 years, located in Tongxiang City, Zhejiang Province, a national 5A-level scenic spot, one of the six ancient towns in Jiangnan. In 2012, the number of tourists received exceeded 6 million for the first time, and in 2017, the number of tourists received exceeded 10 million for the first time. Overall, the development of Wuzhen has gone through three stages: Wuzhen 1.0, which marks a one-day sightseeing tour that started from Dongzha; Wuzhen 2.0, which gradually began to transform into a leisure and holiday center after the completion of Xizha; and Wuzhen 3.0 is an upgrade of the cultural town with the Wuzhen International Drama Festival as an opportunity.
Part I: Wuzhen
"Wuzhen 1.0": Repair dongzha and develop a sightseeing day trip
When Wuzhen began to develop in 1999, when the tourism boom of the ancient town was rising, Zhouzhuang, Xitang, Nanxun and other ancient towns had accumulated at least 5 to 10 years of development foundation, but Wuzhen was facing the dilemma of lack of cultural relics and monuments (only Mao Dun's former residence) and blank tourism. It is precisely because Wuzhen is "a new house, an old house, a broken house" that Chen Xianghong and his team are forced to break the traditional water town style homogenization, static monument display, and line walking in the old model of a thousand towns, and set a commercialization-oriented strategy of developing ancient town development and cultural relics protection around customer experience. This is also the prototype of the "Wuzhen model" that was later regarded as the standard in the industry. The Wuzhen model mainly has several characteristics: overall planning, including overall property rights development, compound diversified operation, equal emphasis on vacation business, and comprehensive asset appreciation; repairing the old with the old, repairing the old as before; and standards, professional operation and management.
First of all, the overall planning of the ancient town layout. Extensive renovation of old buildings and infrastructure, relocation of 7 enterprises, demolition of buildings that do not match the style of the ancient town, rearranging and dredging of the river, and at that time pioneering in the scenic area with pipelines buried in place of chaotic wires in the air, the construction of large parking lots, visitor centers and so on.
Secondly, in the protection and development of cultural relics, it is proposed to "repair the old with the old" and "repair the old as before", and insist on using old materials to restore the appearance of the former residence when restoring the old building. Adhere to the protection of the style of Jiangnan water town, and retain the historical and cultural heritage of ancient town architecture.
Third, create a dynamic ancient town interactive experience. Introduce and restore a number of experience halls (wine workshops, cloth workshops, folk customs halls, etc.) that present the historical and cultural features of the ancient town, and create a "one-day tour" interactive experience with Dongzha characteristics. At that time, it insisted on not building large hotels in Dongzha and not engaging in night tours, with the purpose of minimizing the impact on the lives of indigenous residents and protecting the original style of Jiangnan ancient towns. In addition, it has also formulated the "one store, one product" of the store, the strategy of selling all the goods in the scenic spot, etc., and the traditional concept of attraction tickets is difficult to buy, the food is difficult to eat, and the phenomenon of arbitrary charging is almost extinct in Wuzhen.
After the renovation in 2000, Dongzha came to the top in the ancient town of Jiangnan, and the market response was enthusiastic, and in 2004, it paid off the loan and realized an after-tax profit of 35.5 million yuan. But soon the "selling point" of Dongzha began to be imitated by opponents, and the differentiation of Wuzhen was constantly weakened. Moreover, due to the initial funds, development experience and scenic area of Wuzhen Tourism Company, although Dongzha has innovated in the model, the overall idea is still relatively simple, such as the single source of revenue of scenic spots, mainly relying on ticket revenue; tourists are mainly day trips, tourist stickiness is too low; complex property rights relations lead to in-depth management and limited space for subsequent expansion.
In the third year after the completion of the East Gate, the operation team began the planning and construction of the West Gate. Before competitors imitated and ate through the "selling point" of Dongzha, he set his sights on the larger Xizha, which also opened the first transformation of Wuzhen.
"Wuzhen 2.0": Build Xizha to create a leisure resort center
In 2003, Wuzhen launched the Xizha project through financing, positioning itself to create a scenic spot of "sightseeing + leisure vacation". Different from the limited renovation of The East Gate, the West Gate is a jiangnan ancient town reconstructed on the drawings, and the amount of engineering protection is more than 3 times that of the East Gate, and the construction volume is far more than that of the East Gate. The Xizha project, which is promoted on the basis of the experience of Dongzha development and cultural relics protection, is a "Wuzhen model" in the true sense.
First of all, the overall planning, the overall construction. Like Dongzha, Xizha adheres to the principles of "reuse of historic districts" and "repairing the old as old", while demolishing old buildings that are not coordinated, and all boats and scenic facilities are as old as tradition. The pipeline is buried, 21 kinds of pipes including direct drinking water, fire fighting, rainwater, etc. are laid underground, and a broadband Wi-Fi network is erected. Fundamentally solve the drawbacks of weak infrastructure in traditional ancient towns.
Secondly, unlike Dongzha, which has indigenous residents, Xizha has property rights advantages. The company spent 1 billion yuan to purchase the property rights of shops and houses of indigenous residents and relocate residents in a unified manner. According to the needs of leisure and vacation, the layout of each functional area of the scenic spot is optimized, the dynamic and static of the entire scenic spot are separated, and the functional layout of hotels, homestays, restaurants, folk shops and so on is more reasonable, adapting to the needs of different tourists for sightseeing, leisure vacation, business meetings and so on.
Finally, unified operation and standardized management. This is the most concentrated embodiment of Chen Xianghong's "tough" management model. Xizha, which has property rights, is different from traditional scenic spots in terms of operation mode, and has formulated a highly differentiated "one store, one product" strategy, and each store only sells one Wuzhen specialty commodity at a fair price. Establish unified and standardized accommodation management standards, the resort hotels in Wuzhen are operated by the hotel center, and the homestays are provided by the landlords to provide affectionate services, but the company's unified management standards are implemented. The company uniformly stipulates the special menus and prices of homestays and restaurants, and sells at an affordable price. In order to improve the service quality of the shops, the tenants of the shops are strictly audited (the conditions are that the tenants are husband and wife, giving priority to local residents), and clear and meticulous quality and price standards are formulated for dishes (such as scrambled eggs with tomatoes must be placed in 3 eggs, etc.) and services, and continuous assessment in operation. The management of details can be seen from a Microblog by Chen Xianghong, "After inspecting the scenic spot, I found that there were many problems in the details: the flower umbrellas displayed outside the umbrella shop had not been cleaned for a long time; the benches for tourists to watch in the open-air cinema were reduced to only four at some point; and the stone slabs under the dining table of the river gallery of the No. 67 homestay were heavily stained with oil." In the management of scenic spots, the company operating Xizha even adopts the method of paying wage subsidies to shop tenants to ensure the implementation of the "one store, one product" and the flat price policy. The pursuit of details has become an important part of Wuzhen's "tough" management model, and it is the attention to service details and the solid implementation of rules and regulations that have created the industry reputation of "Wuzhen" brand for ultimate customer experience. As a result, Wuzhen Xizha subverts the traditional community structure, with tourists becoming "townspeople" in the ancient town, while indigenous residents becoming "outsiders" operating homestays, restaurants and shops in scenic spots.
In addition, Wuzhen took the lead in carrying out the construction of "smart town", realizing seamless Wi-Fi access to scenic spots and main streets in the town, building a digital Wuzhen management system, opening online ticket purchase channels, and promoting WeChat public accounts and mobile payment.
"Dongzha + Xizha" has achieved the goal of differentiated positioning, compound diversified operation and vacation business in Wuzhen. Dongzha is mainly based on indigenous life and sightseeing, while Xizha is mainly based on the poetic water town of ancient towns for leisure and vacation, taking into account business meetings. Wuzhen not only achieves differentiation in the positioning of Jiangnan Water Town, but also pursues to bring differentiated experiences to tourists in scenic spots, meeting different needs such as day trips, leisure vacations, and business meetings.
"Wuzhen 3.0": holding a drama festival and transforming a cultural town
In 2013, Wuzhen held the first drama festival, which for the first time integrated theatrical performance with the style of the ancient town, and carefully selected performance venues (such as theaters, amphitheaters, streetsides, shops, etc.) and diversified theatrical performance forms allowed visitors to enjoy the drama while feeling the cultural heritage of Wuzhen. The success of the drama festival has extended the influence of Wuzhen to the cultural and entertainment markets, and drama has become a new business card of Wuzhen. In the same year, many influential international and domestic conferences, including the China Weibo Conference and the G30 Finance Ministers' Conference, were held in Wuzhen. The 2014 World Internet Conference was held in Wuzhen, and it was determined that Wuzhen was a permanent site, and Jiangnan Ancient Town was integrated with Wuzhen of Science and Technology. Subsequently, "Wuzhen Xiangshi", "Flower Drum Opera", "Wuzhen Sanbaijiu", "Wuzhen Sanzhen Zhai Brine Flavor", etc. were selected as the fourth batch of intangible cultural heritage in Zhejiang Province, and Wuzhen gradually accelerated the third brand transformation of "cultural tourism". Wuzhen has invested heavily in the construction of projects such as grand theaters, conference centers, and characteristic homestays, and enhanced the strength to undertake large-scale cultural projects and world conferences. It is not difficult to see that the cultural town is the answer to the future thinking of Wuzhen, giving the ancient town a new cultural connotation, and using the cultural creativity of growth to drive the innovation and growth of the ancient town.
Wuzhen's investment in the cultural field has received positive feedback from the market. According to the data of the Wuzhen Theater Festival Ticketing Center, 7 minutes after the fourth theater festival began to sell tickets in 2016, all the shows of "Big Chicken" were sold out; sales exceeded one million within 8 minutes; 5191 tickets were sold in 10 minutes, and 13256 tickets were sold in 60 minutes. A total of 17,902 tickets were sold on the first day, nearly 50% more than the 12,000 tickets on the first day of 2013. "Big Chicken", "Book of Water", "Gambler", "Caligula", "Don Quixote" all sold out. As popularity has grown, it has become easier to feature world-class plays. From the first 6 to 28 in the seventh theater festival in 2019, the number of performances has increased from 19 to 141, and the Ancient Town Carnival has also increased from more than 500 to nearly 2,000 in 2020.
Many scholars have begun to discuss why the theater festival has only taken root in Wuzhen, and its influence has expanded year by year. Other domestic theater festivals are mostly the beginning of a huge momentum, but quietly ended; why is the International Internet Conference, which has nothing to do with the image of the ancient town, permanently located in Wuzhen? However, it does not give tourists the impression of being chaotic, but makes the water town atmosphere of Wuzhen more modern technology and fashion.
In the traditional concept, drama is more in the attitude of elite art in the lives of ordinary people, and "strangeness" and "distance" are the first reaction of most people to see "drama". People need drama, but the threshold of drama restricts its own development, so that drama returns to drama itself, and returning to humanity has become the consensus of more and more people in the industry. Peter Brooke (Honorary President of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival), known as the greatest theatre director in the contemporary West, said: "Drama is a fundamental human need, and theater and the form and style of drama are only temporary boxes that can be completely replaced." Chen Xianghong is adhering to this concept, breaking these "boxes", using the entire Wuzhen as a stage, letting the drama take root in the streets and shops, and using different performance venues and forms of expression to narrow the distance between the audience and the drama, so that the audience can enjoy the drama. In other words, the theater festival creates a way of life for tourists in Wuzhen from another dimension.
For the permanent location of the International Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Chen Xianghong's statement is more simple and clear: "Without the tourism development of Wuzhen for more than ten years and the completeness of modern supporting facilities under traditional life, such an international national conference cannot take Wuzhen as a permanent meeting address." "In order to differentiate the tourist experience, a series of small improvements such as repairing the old, burying pipelines, and updating the supporting facilities of the homestay have finally brought "qualitative change" effects to Wuzhen.
In the cultural industry, the drama festival has become a new business card of Wuzhen, and in the future, Wuzhen may further promote the international biennale and create a truly diversified cultural ecosystem. Needless to say, in 2017, Wuzhen received a total of 10.1348 million tourists throughout the year, with an operating income of 1.646 billion yuan. In 2018, Wuzhen Scenic Area achieved revenue of 1.908 billion yuan and net profit of 734 million yuan. Nowadays, crowds during the holidays have become the norm in Wuzhen, and there are also a number of 5A-level scenic spots in China that hope to cooperate with Wuzhen to introduce the "Wuzhen model" to improve the quality of scenic services and tourist experience.
Part II: Gubei Water Town and Wujiang Village
Gubei Water Town: Shaping the heroic atmosphere of the ancient town in the north
Gubeikou is located at the junction of Beijing and Hebei, known for its majestic danger, the ancients described its precipitous terrain and military importance as "the ground strangles the throat through the desert, and the heavens stay lock the key pillow Xiongguan" to describe its rugged terrain and military importance. Located here, the Simatai Great Wall is known for its "danger, density, strangeness, ingenuity and completeness", which is one of the few Great Walls that retains the original appearance of the Ming Dynasty, and has been rated as the top of the list of "the world's top ten most unmissable scenery" by The British Reuters Agency. Gubei Water Town, known as "Northern Wuzhen", is located at the foot of the Simatai Great Wall, sitting on the Mandarin Duck Lake Reservoir, which is a "water-friendly hillside"- ancient town integrating sightseeing tourism, leisure vacation, business exhibitions, creative culture and other formats, with the dual brand advantage of "Great Wall + Water Town". Different from the graceful image of the Jiangnan people in Wuzhen, Gubei Water Town shapes the momentum of the ancient town with a heroic atmosphere in the north.
Gubei Water Town is jointly invested by CYTS (30.97% of the investment), IDG Capital (43.55%), Beijing Jingneng Group (10%) and Wuzhen Tourism Co., Ltd. (15.48%), with an estimated total investment of more than 4.2 billion yuan (1.3 billion yuan in the second phase of capital increase), and plans to recover all investment in 8 to 10 years. The resort has 430,000 square meters of exquisite Ming and Qing Dynasty and Republic of China-style mountain courtyard buildings, including 10 boutique hotels, 4 theme hotels, 27 homestay inns, more than 10 cultural display experience areas and perfect supporting service facilities.
The Wuzhen brand has seen the scarcity of resources in the high-quality resorts in the north and begun the expansion road from Jiangnan to Gubei. Gubei Water Town is a test of the "Wuzhen model" in the north, and the brand effect of Wuzhen has naturally become the best endorsement in the early stage of the development of Gubei Water Town. Construction began in 2010, and on New Year's Day 2014 it was put into trial operation (officially put into operation in October), and in just four years, a water town was erected from the foot of the Great Wall. The number of tourists in Gubei Water Town reached 976,000 in the first year (Q1-Q3 trial operation received 776,300 person-times, revenue of 150 million yuan, Q4 official operation received 200,000 person-times), from 2015 to 2018, Gubei Water Town received 1.47 million (50.85%), 2.4392 million (65.68%), 2.7536 million (12.89%), 2.5649 million (down 6.85%). Standing on the shoulders of Wuzhen, the rising star has surpassed the development of its predecessors in less than three years (Wuzhen received 2 million tourists in 2007), and Gubei Water Town is becoming a new benchmark for leisure and vacation destinations in Beijing and even north China.
From the perspective of the market environment, there is a lack of excellent leisure and vacation destinations around Beijing, Hebei only has 5 5A-level scenic spots, and has long been overcrowded; Beijing's local tourism is the same Forbidden City - Summer Palace - Yuanmingyuan - Badaling and other routes are also mostly one-day trips, and lack of attraction to local and surrounding tourists; coupled with large investment in leisure resorts, long recovery period, management difficulties, operational risks, a serious shortage of leisure resorts in Beijing and Tianjin.
From the geographical point of view, Gubeikou is about an hour's drive from the Capital International Airport, about an hour and a half (120 kilometers) from downtown Beijing, closer to Miyun and Chengde (about 45 minutes by car), and the location meets the requirements of the holiday and leisure scenic spots (within the two-hour traffic circle around the central city). It will not become a day trip scenic spot because it is too close, nor will it increase the fatigue of tourists' journey because it is too far away.
In fact, before the design of Gubei Water Town, the operator had spent nearly five months visiting a number of ancient villages around Beijing, inspecting the architectural style of the mountain courtyard, experiencing the local customs and customs, and finally settling: with the Simatai Great Wall as the soul, based on the architectural style of the Republic of China shops in the Beijing-Tianjin area, taking into account the hydrophilic and commercial nature of the ancient buildings, all buildings can integrate with the culture of the ancient Great Wall.
Adjustments to the "Wuzhen model"
Since it is "copied" from Wuzhen, Gubei Water Town must have a DNA similar to Wuzhen; but due to factors such as geographical environment, market competition environment, tourist habits and preferences, Gubei Water Town has been "northernized" according to local conditions. From the perspective of "reproduction", Gubei Water Town and Wuzhen have adopted the same strategy in terms of overall planning and property rights repurchase, repair of old as old, pipeline burial, unified operation and standardized management.
Benefit local residents
Overall planning and property repurchase. Gubei Water Town spent a huge amount of money to buy out all the property rights of shops and residential houses in the original village, which was included in the overall planning of the water town and handed over to the operating company for unified management. For the relocation and resettlement of local residents, a three-tier guarantee strategy is adopted: First, in cooperation with the Miyun County government, the government will build resettlement houses in a unified way, and the villagers will solve the problem of residents' relocation by means of buyback (compensation of 2,000 yuan / square meter, much higher than the price of the house). In only two years, a new village with a total construction area of 94,315 square meters was built, with 1,136 people relocated and 499 housing units. Secondly, it is promised that after the development of Gubei Water Town, a proprietary folk customs area will be established, and villagers will enjoy the right of first refusal, and villagers can open homestays in relocated houses. Finally, in cooperation with the government, we will unify the planning and construction of transportation, water supply, drainage, communication and other infrastructure in the relocated new villages to improve the quality of life of local residents. As a result, Simatai Village has also jumped from the old countryside on the outskirts of Beijing to the list of the Ministry of Agriculture's "2015 China's Most Beautiful Leisure Villages".
Benefit the culture and the environment
Repair the old as the old, renovate as before. The cultural relics and ancient buildings preserved in Gubeikou are repaired using old materials, and strive to restore the style of the real northern fortress ancient town. The newly built ancient roads, homestays and restored museums in the ancient town also adopt the method of "recycling old materials + repairing ancient buildings". Among them, the acquisition of the old courtyard in the suburbs of Beijing and Shanxi alone cost more than 70 million yuan, and the acquisition of old stone materials on the main walking path of Gubei Water Town also cost more than 80 million yuan, and the old Simatai Great Wall city bricks were recovered from local villagers for the restoration of part of the Great Wall.
On the road of creating a "cultured" resort and leisure town, Gubei adheres to the consistent style of Wuzhen. Do not label water towns, and strive to create an open cultural platform. Just as a series of cultural and commercial activities such as the Wuzhen Drama Festival and the Internet Conference have made Wuzhen stand out from the many Jiangnan water towns, Gubei Water Town has also made rapid progress towards the goal of "new benchmarks for leisure and vacation" in North China with the help of the "Dionysus" Great Wall Theater, the Simatai Great Wall Sports culture series (Great Wall Marathon, Great Wall Concert, etc.), and the introduction of variety shows.
Benefit visitors
Pipelines are buried and infrastructure is improved. Some media say that "sewers are the conscience of the city", and Gubei Water Town has spent more than 1.2 billion yuan on the infrastructure and ecological environment construction of scenic spots. Dredging and renovating rivers, reinforcing mountains, building special passages, diverting people and vehicles, building a comprehensive three-level pipe corridor with a length of more than two kilometers (2.2 meters high and 2 meters wide), burying water supply, heat, sewage and other pipelines, retaining the ground appearance of the ancient town while strengthening the protection of the environment. Most of the underground pipe corridors of such a scale have not yet been reached in Beijing, and only the Forbidden City has them in the scenic spots. In addition, specially built sewage treatment plants, water plants, direct drinking water plants, power stations and other infrastructure, the quality of direct drinking water exceeds European standards, and the whole town achieves high-speed Wi-Fi network coverage. It is worth noting that Gubei is a new design that draws lessons from Wuzhen. As Chen Xianghong said, in the design of Gubei, the lessons of Water Street (the main street of Wuzhen) have been learned, in addition to the functional layout of the street buildings will be optimized according to the flow of passengers, which is convenient for tourists to visit and visit, and according to the characteristics of the northern environment, the tall crown-like trees such as national locust, jujube trees, hawthorn trees, etc. are selected to replace the low vegetation of water street according to the characteristics of the northern environment.
Institutional safeguards
Unified operation and standardized management. According to the preferences of northern tourists, a differentiated "one store, one product" strategy has been formulated to standardize accommodation management standards. On the final design of Wangjing Street, the planned shops include the Women's Hot Spring Hotel, cafes, photo studios, themed restaurants, bakeries, silk satin villages, etc., but many shops can still be seen vacant. In this regard, Chen Xianghong believes that the development of Gubei Water Town should not be in a hurry, but should be taken slowly to see which ones are really suitable for re-introduction. For shops that have already determined their functions and themes, they will not rush into operation in accordance with the principle of preferring shortages and not indiscriminately before finding a suitable operator.
The management of accommodation has been further developed on the basis of adhering to the Wuzhen model. Accommodation in Gubei Water Town is divided into four categories according to its characteristics: boutique hotels, theme hotels, inns and homestays, the first three of which are uniformly operated by the company to meet the needs of different tourists. The accommodation of the homestay is the responsibility of the company, and the catering is handed over to the landlord. Unify the special menus and prices of homestays and restaurants, and sell them at an affordable price. The conditions for recruiting homestay landlords in Gubei Water Town and Wuzhen are almost harsh, in order to achieve Chen Xianghong's requirement that "the main body of the homestay landlord should be the family, and the apartment should be standardized in the service of family affection and randomness". Therefore, in addition to the hard conditions: (1) couples under the age of 45, (2) like Gubei Water Town, willing to live at the foot of the Great Wall, (3) love catering and cuisine, have specialties, (4) have engaged in the service industry (catering, guest rooms, kitchens), etc., but also require the landlord to have a cheerful personality, innovative spirit, willing to share with others and so on. Chen Xianghong insists that only landlords with affinity, creativity and optimistic and positive life can provide a cordial and casual family atmosphere for tourists.
The differences and challenges between Wuzhen and Gubei Water Town
Simple "replication" is far from achieving the leap from Wuzhen to Gubei Water Town, and while having similar genes, adapting to local conditions is the key to the success of replicating the "Wuzhen model".
First of all, the geographical location determines that the style of Gubei Water Town is obviously different from Thatu Town. From the beginning of the design, Gubei has positioned itself as a northern water town integrating the culture of the Great Wall, and has made hydrophilic and commercial adjustments on the basis of the style of the Republic of China in Beijing, Tianjin and The Republic of China. The whole should not only conform to the northern aesthetic, but also highlight the use of "water" in the Wuzhen brand. Compared with Wuzhen, although Gubei faces the problem of winter off-season, it also has unlimited possibilities for carrying out various winter activities, such as snow viewing on the Great Wall in winter, temple fairs in winter, ice sculpture festivals in winter, folk hot kang festivals in winter, hot spring vacations and other tourism activities. Gubei Water Town has preserved a large number of local traditional folk culture in Gubeikou, such as The New Year Painting Workshop, The Villain Bookstore, the Shadow Puppet Hall, the Paper-cutting, the Dart Bureau, the Yang Invincible Ancestral Hall, the Eight Flags Guild Hall, and the Private School. The distillery has also changed from Jiangnan rice wine in Wuzhen to local Sima Xiaoyao. On the basis of copying the Wuzhen model, it is particularly important to consider the specific product design according to the local cultural traditions and historical features of Gubei Water Town, the core of each product, the distribution of product lines, and the proportion (importance) of different products.
Secondly, the consumption habits of the tourist groups facing Gubei Water Town are different from those of Wuzhen. From the perspective of market competition, Wuzhen is surrounded by many water towns of the same type, such as Zhouzhuang and Xitang, and has been facing fierce competition. In contrast, Gubei Water Town, the only leisure and vacation center in the suburbs of Beijing with elements such as "Water Town" and "Great Wall", has become a new tourist landmark in North China in less than three years after its completion. From the perspective of consumption habits, the construction of Wuzhen in 1999 coincided with the rise of holiday and leisure tourism in Jiangnan. The consumer market that Gubei Water Town mainly faces is limited by the resources and types of the early prospect area (mostly one-day scenic spots, such as the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Badaling Great Wall, etc.), and has not yet developed the consumption habit of vacation and leisure tourism. Therefore, Gubei Water Town, which is positioned as a leisure and vacation center, has to concentrate on cultivating the market, accelerating the transformation of tourists' tourism consumption habits, and improving the experience and quality of tourism products. This process also requires the cost of long incubation time, low initial revenue and high marketing costs, and investors also face the risks of extended payback periods.
Finally, the top management of Gubei Water Town is from Wuzhen. But from a practical point of view, the differences between the north and the south also exist in the management team. Humanistic differences, especially between the senior management team and grass-roots employees, the difference between the management team and the concept of tourists are the first problems solved by Gubei Water Town. How Gubei Water Town draws on the management experience and ineffable management experience of the Wuzhen team, solves the problem of the management team's dissatisfaction with the water and soil, and localizes the experience of Wuzhen into the management experience of Gubei Water Town, which also considers the wisdom of the leadership.
Wujiang Village: The future challenge of the Wuzhen model
After Wuzhen and Gubeishui, Chen Xianghong turned his attention to the next village, Wujiang Village, a remote mountain village in Shangji Town, Bozhou District, Zunyi City, Guizhou Province. Here, he wants to do a completely different project from before, using a business model to solve the problem of poverty in this rural area with underdeveloped resources, and to find a new way out for more poor villages facing similar situations.
In January 2015, General Secretary Xi Jinping proposed during his inspection in Yunnan: "The construction of new rural areas must take the road that conforms to the actual conditions of rural areas, follow the laws of rural development, fully reflect the characteristics of rural areas, pay attention to local taste, retain rural styles, retain green mountains and rivers, and remember homesickness." "The Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China put the rural revitalization strategy as a national strategy on the important agenda of the work of the party and the government, and clarified the goals and tasks for the specific revitalization of rural areas, which specifically proposed to promote the sustainable development of rural tourism."
Chen Xianghong and his team hope to change a range of problems such as rural poverty and hollowing out through sustainable tourism business models. Since 2016, Chen Xianghong led the team to visit many times and decided to build a public welfare project for the protection of ancient villages in Wujiang and poverty alleviation through tourism in accordance with the general idea of "tourism poverty alleviation and revitalization of ancient villages". Talking about the expectations for the Wujiang Village project, Chen Xianghong said: "Many people still don't understand why I picked such a place as Wujiang Village, and I think very clearly, I don't want to do how big the number of tourists, how famous, how high the commercial value, I think these are secondary, as long as under the overall balance of this project, so that the people there can feel the hope of the future, through tourism to start a new life, this is the biggest effect." ”
The Wujiang Convention and the development of "symbiosis"
In Wujiang Village, all the systems are discussed with local villagers, and they also try to establish tourism cooperatives in the form of tourism, and if you join the cooperative, you must abide by the common agreement. Among them, the most emblematic of the project concept is the Wujiang Convention, a total of seven articles, including the choice of development model, operation and management model, project benefit distribution and standardization of the government, project managers, villagers' behavior and other most basic guiding ideology and principles for the sustainable development of Wujiang Village, including who is the future subject? What is the pattern of profit distribution? What is the organizational structure of the cooperative? Chen Xianghong said frankly that he had served as the secretary of the township party committee for 12 years, and he had his own experience of the management at the town and village level and the feelings of the people, and hoped that this programmatic document could help define the relationship between the government, companies, village economic cooperatives, villagers, townships and towns.
In the Wujiang Village project, there is a key word "symbiosis", which actually coincides with the concept of "common benefit". At the heart of symbiosis is harmony and balance, taking into account a variety of stakeholders. For example, in the resettlement of peasants after demolition, it is necessary to pick the best position and provide various jobs in the tourism industry chain, so that local villagers can have yellow hair and hair, and they can also create employment and production opportunities for migrant workers to return to their hometowns; tourists can also coexist harmoniously in the peach blossom garden in the new era and enjoy themselves. The Wujiang Village project began operation from 2019 to 2020, driving an increase of 14,849 yuan in per capita disposable income in the core area.
observe
The common value of the Wuzhen model
From Xiudongzha and wuzhen 1.0 for developing a one-day sightseeing trip, to building Wuzhen 2.0 for a leisure and vacation center, to wuzhen 3.0 for running dramas and transforming cultural towns, the spirit of common benefit embodied in wuzhen in the process of design and construction runs through it.
Liang Sicheng wrote in the book "Great Clumsiness to Beauty": I think that repairing an ancient cultural relics building with a new look is like polishing some Zhou Ding Han mirrors with copper oil, which will seriously damage its historical and artistic value. In the reconstruction of cultural relics buildings with historical and artistic value, the principle of "the old is as old" should generally be used to restore their "health" instead of "returning children" and "young" in appearance.
In the protection and development of cultural relics, Wuzhen proposed "repairing the old with the old" and "repairing the old as before", and insisted on using old materials to restore the appearance of the former residence when restoring the old building. Adhere to the protection of the style of Jiangnan water town, and retain the historical and cultural heritage of ancient town architecture. The process was not smooth sailing, and the concept of "repairing the old with the old" was opposed by some cultural relics conservation experts, and some experts even suggested that Wuzhen be pulled off from the preliminary list of world cultural heritage. With the test of time, the effect and significance of the "repairing the old" model have become increasingly prominent, and have been praised by UNESCO special assessment expert Alain Maranos as the "Wuzhen model" for the protection of ancient towns. This concept has formed obvious differences between Wuzhen and many ancient towns in Jiangnan, and has also produced a "common benefit" value that cannot be ignored for the local style, historical protection and inheritance of Wuzhen.
A town is an organic tissue with meridians, pulses, textures, and the health of each part of the organism enables the whole organism to function and circulate benignly. Wuzhen's design adopts the principle of overall planning, relocates and demolishes buildings and enterprises that are inconsistent with the style of the ancient town, dredges the river channel, pioneers the use of pipelines in scenic spots to replace the chaotic wires in the air, lays 21 kinds of pipes including direct drinking water, fire fighting, rainwater, etc. underground, builds large parking lots, visitor centers, erects broadband Wi-Fi networks, and uses forward-looking vision to solve the shortcomings of the weak infrastructure of traditional ancient towns.
At the same time, Wuzhen has injected the genes of contemporary culture and aesthetics into Wuzhen through cultural and creative industries and products such as the Drama Festival and the Muxin Art Museum. The theater festival integrates theatrical performance with the style of the ancient town, combining theaters, amphitheaters, streetsides, shops and diversified theatrical performance forms, so that the drama from Yangchun White Snow into everyone's life; the Muxin Art Museum has also become a landmark building in Wuzhen, promoting the Renaissance of Wuzhen, and the landing of the World Internet Conference has added a strong ink to the integration of Wuzhen culture and technology, history and modernity.
According to Chen Xianghong, more than 80% of the thousands of people engaged in homestay and tourism operations in Wuzhen Xizha are local people who speak Wuzhen dialect, and more than 17,000 people in and around Wuzhen are engaged in peripheral hotels and homestay restaurants.
Compared with many domestic tourist attractions, once tourism is developed, the indigenous people get rent from merchants, and merchants have the phenomenon of ripping off customers when they bear the pressure of rent. For Wuzhen, most of the people who provide various types of services are the indigenous people of Wuzhen, who accept standardized management and strict assessment as service providers, so the service quality of Wuzhen can be controlled and manageable. The indigenous people can also live and work in their hometowns, obtain dignified employment opportunities, welcome guests from all over the country and even the world, and exchange high-quality labor for a better life.
Wuzhen adopts a unique "one store, one product" strategy, each store only sells one Wuzhen specialty product at a fair price. The tenants of the shops are conditioned to be husband and wife, give priority to the audit conditions of local residents, formulate clear and meticulous quality and price standards for dishes and services, and continuously assess them in operation. In the management of the homestay has formulated a strict and perfect system, paying attention to every detail of the tourist experience, such as egg scrambled tomatoes must be no less than 4 eggs, there is only one shop in a street that sells radish silk cakes, each shop can not turn over the table more than twice a night, wipe the rags in different places of different colors, etc., and strive to make tourists have a beautiful experience. Based on this, Wuzhen put forward the propaganda slogan of "I have come, I have never left". The people-oriented design concept makes Wuzhen full of confidence in the number of tourists and the rate of re-visiting.
Through the introduction of the Wuzhen model and the Gubei Water Town and Wujiang Village copied from the Wuzhen model, we can see that the Wuzhen model takes into account the cultural common interests of history and modern times, the common benefits of residents and the common interests of tourists through commercial operations such as overall property rights development, compound diversified operation, and unified operation standardized management. In a sense, the two cases of Wuzhen and Gubei Water Town are relatively successful, but at the same time, the replicability of the Wuzhen model also faces some problems.
Because the overall property rights development of the Wuzhen model itself needs to cooperate with the local government, it is not a product of the market economy in the full sense. Taking Gubei Water Town as an example, if it is not a disguised real estate exit model to backfill the operation of water town itself, it is likely that it will not be able to cover the financial costs of its investment and operation. In addition, there is a micro-ecological business imbalance in Gubei Water Town, which is difficult to cause consumers' desire to consume, which will seriously affect customer stickiness, resulting in customers being difficult to contribute to the project by living, playing and buying. Wuzhen also has the same problem, in the era of consumption upgrading, the commercial micro-ecological positioning is too low, affecting the intensity of consumption, often resulting in a significant difference between light and peak seasons. In addition, for management, the executive team is demanding. This makes it challenging to develop the right talent. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, how to create good content in the copied Gubei Water Town and other projects is probably the most difficult and core challenge. In the future, we will continue to pay attention to the operation and sustainable development of the Wuzhen model, and hope that the Wujiang Village project can create a "Wuzhen model" in the field of poverty alleviation and explore a common and sustainable development path for more poor villages.
This case was written by Yan Wen and Li Mengjun of the Social Innovation and Brand Research Center of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business under the guidance of Professor Zhu Rui. The copyright of this case belongs to Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and is authorized to be published by China Business Daily. This article has been debridged.