By Chen Ke

Chen Zhuolin’s straw sculptures.

A “rural maker” inherits rice culture with straw weaving

Chen Zhuolin’s straw sculptures of Peppa Pig’s family.

At around 8 a.m., Lianshan Industrial Park in Huitong County, Huaihua City, Hunan Province, starts buzzing with the arrival of workers from local villages. One of the park’s tenants is a 1,500-square-meter straw craft factory owned by Chen Zhuolin, a rural entrepreneur who returned to her hometown deep in the mountains after 20 years away.

Chen has since won many awards for her straw craft business including a silver medal in the China Rural Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition, a gold medal in the Hunan Provincial Rural Entrepreneurship Innovation Project Creative Competition, a National Young Woman Agricultural Entrepreneur Award, and a National Outstanding Leader of Rural Entrepreneurship Award.

What other opportunities are hidden in this fertile rural land? Chen is not sure. But she will continue her efforts to inherit rice culture nonetheless.

Against the backdrop of rural revitalization, an increasing number of “rural makers” are heading home.

Dream Weaving

Early one morning, Chen Zhuolin departed her home in a village in the suburbs of Huaihua City to make the 20-kilometer trip to the factory. That day, she planned to put some finishing touches on an urban landscape project for a traffic island in Huitong County.

“Choose high-quality straw ropes and straw curtains from the warehouse,” Chen instructed her employees. “The main frame has to be carefully welded with reinforcing bars.” She still manages to track every detail of the production process despite an increasing number of urban landscape decoration orders with the approach of the Spring Festival.

Chen accumulated her experience over years of exploration. She studied arts and crafts at college. After graduation, her first job was in sales in Zhejiang Province, far from home. She had to leave her daughter behind. In 2015, she decided to return home.

“I wanted to get involved in arts but didn’t know how,” recalled Chen. “In Zhejiang, I experienced the popularity of agricultural tourism and weekend getaways, but they were not yet popular in my hometown.” She decided to start a business involving a flower sea with 1.2 million yuan (US$185,000) she borrowed from relatives and friends.

Huaihua City is one of China’s national agricultural preservation experimental areas, where Yuan Longping, a scientist known as the “father of hybrid rice,” developed China’s first high-yield hybrid rice strain in 1973. Huitong County, under the jurisdiction of Huaihua, is an agricultural county with abundant straw resources. Chen tried using it to build some scarecrows in the flower sea, which added new flavors to the scenic spot and boosted visitor flow.

While she was there, a trend in Zhejiang Province was building monotowns with specialized industries such as film, medicine, fashion, energy, or robotics. “I thought about that experience but chose to invest in straw crafts, which are even more profitable than agritourism,” said Chen. She learned a whole set of production techniques from experienced craftsmen including selection of raw material, design, framing, and coloring before establishing her own ecoagricultural company in November 2015.

The flower sea became a perfect location for Chen to advertise her straw crafts, and orders soon started rolling in. “If the workers finish all the orders on time or ahead of time, they get a bonus of 3 to 5 percent of the total value of the orders,” explained Chen. “After each autumn harvest, I look around the local villages to buy fresh straw at 25 yuan (US$3.85) a bundle, which adds about 250 yuan (US$38.5) per mu (0.07 ha) to farmers’ income.” Chen started organizing production of various straw sculptures in different designs such as animals and cartoon figures.

Chen still remembers a client entrusting her with the landscape design of an entire park. To satisfy the client, she paid a handsome amount of money to hire a qualified designer. “Later, I consulted a professional branding agency and incorporated brand planning, design, and landscaping into the business of my company,” she recalled. The move multiplied her revenues. Now, her straw crafts sell to more than 120 cities around the country and produce an annual sales volume of over 7 million yuan (US$1.08 million). “Orders come from as far as Jilin Province in northeast China,” she said, “To prevent the straw sculptures from being damaged on the long journey, I arrange localized production.”

Chen never expected the opportunity to meet with Yuan Longping. “In 2018, I won a silver medal in the Second China Rural Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition,” she recounted. “I showed Yuan my straw creations, and he was pleasantly surprised to see the straw transformed into art. In 2019, I won another prize and visited him again, so we agreed to meet every year. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn’t see each other again until I learned of his passing last year.”

Chen hung calligraphy by Yuan reading “Study Rice Culture; Inherit Rice Civilization” and a photo with him on the wall in her office. Looking back at her years of entrepreneurship, she felt the most difficult thing was first getting recognized. “I’m just a 145-centimeter-tall girl,” she said, “Many people acted like this was the wrong thing for me. I don’t hear much of that anymore.”

Chen Zhuolin at a display area of her “Rice Dreamland.”

Chen’s straw crafts are designated by the local government as a means of employment promotion and poverty alleviation.

Poverty Alleviation

After lunch, Chen Zhuolin traveled to another installation site in Huitong County to join her workers. “The road foundation is uneven right there,” she explained to them. “If the joints are not welded properly, the whole structure will collapse in heavy wind. I will have to inspect the joints carefully.”

As the Spring Festival draws near, many cities carry out holiday decoration projects. Chen received orders from six counties in Huaihua City worth about 3 million yuan (US$461,500). She traveled to three counties in a single day to supervise.

“Urban landscape decoration is similar to straw craft production,” Chen said. “Practice makes perfect. The workers are farmers from local villages. To make a new product, we have a three-member team plan and design it before assigning tasks to workers. We check in on them when we have time.”

For the local villagers seeking to work while taking care of family, the job is ideal. In 2019, China launched a nationwide battle against poverty. Chen’s company helped lift 204 registered poor households and six severely impoverished households out of poverty.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic cut the argitourism industry almost in half and trapped most of her labor force at home. But Chen’s straw crafts were designated by the local government as a means of employment promotion and poverty alleviation. In April 2020,a poverty alleviation workshop was established in Wangdong Village in Huitong County, Huaihua City, with support from the Huaihua Municipal Publicity Department. On July 23, its first livestream took place. Six “Model Hunan Residents” and provincial influencers sold 1,257 straw baskets online in just 90 minutes. Each basket added 2 to 10 yuan (US$0.3-1.5) to farmers’ income. “At the height of the workshop’s production in June and July that year, 50 to 60 local villagers were involved.”

“With the economic recovery in the second half of 2020, the government organized two groups of our workers to transfer to coastal areas,” said Chen. “Because of that, our production capacity dropped. To maintain our market share, I started doing a lot of the work myself. Still, we suffered greatly from the pandemic. The new urban landscape projects are a huge deal for us.”

Urban landscape projects involve heavy physical labor, so Chen didn’t want to hire elderly people in local villages. “We published information about our demand for labor on the platform of the Lianshan Industrial Park and the county’s human resources and social security bureau,” said Chen. “We offered an average monthly salary of around 6,000 yuan (US$920). During holiday seasons like National Day and Spring Festival, workers can make as much as 10,000 yuan (US$1,540) in a month.”

Against the backdrop of rural revitalization, an increasing number of “rural makers” are heading home. Chen feels strongly that governmental support increases the opportunity in rural areas. “Just be dedicated to a certain cause, whether straw or something else, and you will achieve something,” she said. “When I started making straw crafts, they nicknamed me ‘scarecrow.’ At first, I thought they were making fun of me, but I like being the ‘scarecrow girl’ now.”

Chen has some new ideas for the future. “I want to build a floral town in my village,” she reported. “My vision is to build a rural leisure attraction with a fine collection of flower markets and straw products.”