Aerial view of Huayuan village in Dongyang, Zhejiang province. [Photo by Wang Jianghong/for chinadaily.com.cn]

Huayuan village in Dongyang, Zhejiang province, is using mahogany furniture, new materials and biomedicine in its rural vitalization effort.

The entire village — population 65,000 — has been lifted out of poverty. Each family has a modern house, and private cars are common.

The village achieved an operating income of 65.5 billion yuan ($9.48 billion), with residents' per capita annual income rising to 165,000 yuan last year.

Yet its population was only 496 about 40 years ago, when the per capita annual income of villagers was 87 yuan and only a few families lived in houses with tile roofs.

"I started to be interested in mahogany furniture when I was 16 years old. I think I have witnessed the development of the mahogany furniture industry here for the past two decades," said Lei Qinglian, a resident who now owns four big booths in the mahogany furniture production base.

"Huayuan village has a mahogany furniture production base with an entire industry chain and characteristics of an industrial cluster."

Aerial view of Huayuan village in Dongyang, Zhejiang province. [Photo by Wang Jianghong/for chinadaily.com.cn]

As early as 2005, the local government began to offer services and build platforms for enterprises to gather various resources for mahogany furniture development.

In 2009, Huayuan Group, which manages the mahogany furniture production base in Dongyang, began to build a market platform for the industry, which integrates raw materials, production, furniture design, logistics, sales, cultural festivals and other related services.

The success of Huayuan lies in making the best use of the market, said Hou Yunchun, former deputy director of the Development Research Center of the State Council.

As of the end of 2022, Huayuan village had 2,950 private businesses, including 1,871 engaging in the mahogany furniture and wood products industry.

Moreover, multiple industrial projects have been brought to the village, injecting fresh momentum into the local economy and helping the village take on a new look over recent decades.

To achieve stable development, Huayuan Group pays more attention to emerging sectors, such as biomedical technologies, new energy and new materials and new building materials, as well as to services relating to culture, tourism, education, and medicine.

"Huayuan village's experience not only proves it is possible to transform a poor village into a rich one but also provides a development path for rural vitalization that takes industry as the premise and focuses on infrastructure and public services at the same time," said Yun Wenju, director of the Engineering Technology Innovation Center of the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Since Zhejiang province was designated two years ago as a demonstration zone for achieving common prosperity two years ago, communities across the province have adopted a raft of measures in pursuit of special industries, aiming to narrow the rural-urban gap.