I visited my childhood home two weeks ago. It is in Zunyi, Guizhou Province in Southwest China.
I lived there till age 17, when I left for college in Beijing in 1989.
My parents retired in 1996 and moved back to the east coast where they came from. I haven’t been back since.
Many people, both in China and outside, have heard of the incredible transformation of Shenzhen from a fishing village of 30,000 in the early 80s to a high-tech mega-city of 18 million.
I first visited the city in 1993 and have witnessed its rise as I travel to Shenzhen a few times each year.
What is less well known is that Shenzhen’s transformation is hardly unique in China.
Over the last few decades, hundreds of Chinese cities and towns have gone through their own metamorphosis on similar scale, if less grandeur and dramatic.
Guizhou, also spelt as Kweichow in old times, is a mountainous landlocked province known historically as one of the most impoverished regions of the country.
For centuries, it is famous for “the sky never stays clear for three days, the ground never stays flat for three feet, and the people never have three coins” (天无三日晴，地无三分平，人无三两银).
The province is home to over 40 ethnic minorities which constitute 37% of its population of 38 million. Miao, Yi, Hui, and Thai are some of the main ethic groups.
Transportation was the biggest bottleneck for development as the province is covered with karst mountains, rivers, and valleys.
Guizhou is the only province in China without plains. Rice has to be planted on terraced paddies on hill slopes.
Local produce couldn’t be shipped out and even going to school took hours of traversing endless mountainous terrain.
As a result, Guizhou long suffered from backward economic and human capital development.
The closest US proximate to Guizhou is probably the Southern Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Alabama.
The hillbilly country......
Here is something I never expected in my wildest dream as a youngster – I now proudly claim that I am a digital hillbilly from Guizhou.
