Tied Together in Despair

Sticking it out is like two fish gasping for life in a puddle, spitting water at each other to stay alive. But it won't work. There's no hope, just dragging on.

In certain villages, collective decisions were made to use poverty-alleviation funds for road construction.

It's tough right now—tougher than you can imagine. Guangdong is okay, but Zhejiang in the Jiangzhe region was particularly poor back in the 1980s, especially in mountainous areas without water transport.

But precisely because they burned their bridges and opened roads first, allowing trade and commerce to flow, those people later made their fortunes. As outsiders flooded in, locals hired workers to open factories and built houses to collect rent.

When you look at the national GDP today, more than half is concentrated along the southeast coast. That's how this snowball grew.

Zoom out, and this story reflects what our country has been doing over the past four decades.