Hu Xinwei is the director of the Village Supervision Committee of Houchen Village, Wuyi County, Zhejiang Province.
At the monthly meeting of all party members in Houchen Village, Wuyi County, Zhejiang Province, it is a fixed matter for the director of the supervisory committee to report on the village's financial income and expenditure for the previous month, which is called "account reporting."
Let me sing to you about last month’s account. It costs 794 yuan to buy stainless steel lunch boxes, anti-slip mats, etc. in the canteen for the elderly. The village office building bought copy paper for 625.46 yuan. It costs 85.22 yuan to buy termite medicine within the village. The village office building purchased party flags, mosquito coils, etc. for 186.82 yuan.
What is the Village Supervisory Committee?
This is described in Article 32 of the Organic Law of the Villagers Committee of the People's Republic of China. The village should establish a village affairs supervision committee or other forms of village affairs supervision agencies to be responsible for the democratic financial management of villagers and supervise the implementation of village affairs disclosure and other systems.
Compared with the traditional "two village committees" of the village party branch committee and the village committee, the institutional arrangement of the "third committee" of the village affairs supervision committee appeared relatively late. Although it has now spread all over the country, few people know about it. , it first appeared in the democratic practice of Houchen Village.
Twenty years ago, when a reporter from "Investigation News" came to Houchen Village, it was undergoing a transformation from chaos to governance.
Chen Zhonglong: If two people work together, it will be easy to swallow the village’s money.
Houchen Village is located on the outskirts of Wuyi County. At the end of the 20th century, with the advancement of industrialization and urbanization, a large amount of land was expropriated, and the funds at the disposal of the village collective also increased sharply.
At that time, the village's finances were not open and transparent. Some village cadres abused their power for personal gain and coveted collective assets. The conflicts between cadres and the masses continued to escalate. After entering 2000, Houchen Village had three consecutive village party secretaries within two years, making it a well-known problem village in the county. In 2004, Hu Wenfa, who served as village party secretary in Chencun after being urgently recalled from the superior sub-district, proposed the idea of establishing a village affairs supervision agency , that is, an agency independent of the village committees and committees would be selected from village representatives to supervise village cadres. supervision. This idea was supported by the Wuyi County Party Committee. At this point, Houchen Village began a pilot project of a village affairs supervision agency. On June 18, 2004, the country's first village affairs supervision committee was officially established in Houchen Village.
The director of the Supervisory Committee said that every income and expenditure mentioned in the account will be posted on the bulletin board in the village and dried in the sun, giving the people a clear understanding and at the same time giving the cadres a clean slate. In 2010, as the village affairs supervision committee system was officially written into the Organic Law of Village Committees of the People's Republic of China, more than 600,000 administrative villages across the country have established village affairs supervision committees. "Later Chen's experience" has also become a benchmark for grassroots governance across the country. one. Visiting and inspection groups from all over the country came in droves, but they all seemed to have the same confusion.
Wu Xingyong: The delegation who comes to inspect and study will ask this question. He said that our village supervision committee has been established for many years, and the staffing has also arrived, but it always feels that it has not played a substantial role. Become a decoration. So what do you do here?
Hu Xinwei: Some old party members who were village cadres at the time will also say that our supervisory committee has changed now. I say it has indeed changed, because the social form has changed, and it has actually changed in the past twenty years. a lot of.
What impact has twenty years of democratic supervision had on Houchen Village, and what valuable experiences and lessons have been left behind? Can the Village Supervisory Committee, which has experienced constant exploration and transformation, continue to play its role in the new era? Twenty years later, "Journalism Investigation" returned to Houchencun, hoping to find answers.
The canteen for the elderly in Houchencun: "It is difficult to adjust according to everyone's opinions", how to adjust it?
Xu Yuexiang is the president of Houchen Village Elderly Association. Every morning, he would go to the elderly canteen in the village to check whether the food bought by the chef was fresh and sufficient.
The bulletin board in the canteen will be written with the day's expenditure details that have been checked by Xu Yuexiang every day. According to the village cadres, Houchen people are different and everything must be made public.
Chen Huayin and Chen Chunfu, who are supervised by Chairman Xu every day, are both natives of Houchen Village. The village stipulates that senior citizens over 70 years old can eat here for free.
Chen Huayin: 130 people at around noon. Everyone says it’s impossible to say it tastes good, and there are definitely some people who say it doesn’t taste good.
Compared with the surrounding villages, Houchen Village’s senior citizens’ canteen started the earliest and has the largest number of people dining there. Like most senior citizens’ canteens, the difficulty of consensus is an unavoidable and seemingly unsolvable problem. Unlike many canteens where rice is cooked in large pots, Houchen Village subsidizes rice money to individuals. Villagers will bring their own lunch boxes and decide how much rice to put in and how much water to add.
Xu Yuexiang: Other villages are not like this. They all cook rice collectively. This was decided by the village cadres based on everyone’s wishes. I think our method is better. To be honest, some people only eat two taels of rice. If they insist on taking back half a catty or four taels, if you don't agree, they will have conflicts and disputes. Because they take some of their rice back to feed chickens and dogs. The thinking of old people is different from that of young people.
It is not only necessary to meet the individual needs of the elderly, but also to control costs. Working in the elderly canteen is not easy. In 2014, the first chef of Houchen Village Senior Canteen was Chen Chunfu. He has been there almost all the time for ten years. In the first half of last year, the village replaced him because they were worried that the villagers would get tired of eating.
Hu Xinwei: Before , the employment system was directly adopted. The village set a standard for chefs. I sent it to all the county platforms. I said that we should recruit chefs in our canteen because the economic salary is not high. It turned out to be 2,700 per month for a chef. , which means that there are 365 days, which may be the days of rest in the first month, and you cannot be absent from work.
Chen Chunfu’s identity is different now. In May 2023, Houchencun conducted an open bidding for chefs in the senior canteen for the first time. started bidding downwards with a monthly salary of 8,000 yuan. Chen Huayin finally stood out with a quotation of 7,480 yuan, and Chen Chunfu became his partner.
Hu Xinwei: seniors will have more opinions and suggestions, and they will have a more democratic concept. He feels that they have a sense of ownership, and they will have this sense of participation if they want to put forward my opinions and suggestions on the development of Houchen. Then last year we adopted a bidding process, and after the current chef submitted his bid, we still invited the old chef back.
The village is brewing a new plan to improve the canteen for the elderly.
At the village affairs joint meeting, Hu Xinwei, director of the supervisory committee, proposed an innovative idea: contract out the entire canteen. In addition to ensuring services to the elderly in the village, they can also operate it externally.
After several debates, the two village committees did not reach a consensus. Everyone believed that this plan was not yet mature and did not meet the conditions to be submitted to the Villagers Congress for discussion. A new round of bidding is just around the corner. Can Hu Xinwei's vision be realized? Where will the Houchencun Senior Citizens Canteen go next under democratic supervision?
Supervision of the whole process: take the initiative to set up a stage, please come and check
"Neighbor's House" is taken from the Wuyi dialect, which means good neighbor, and the "Neighbor's House" discussion and consultation meeting is an innovative pilot project in Wuyi County to promote village-level discussions and consultations, simple In other words, the chairman of the supervisory committee presided over the establishment of a platform to allow more stakeholders to participate.
The topic today was the senior citizens’ canteen. There were 13 participants in total. In addition to the village cadres, they also included the president of the senior citizens’ association, representatives who ate in the senior citizens’ canteen, and village sages in the village’s catering industry.
According to the meeting procedure, the members of the discussion will speak one by one, and then vote after debate and consultation. Finally, a result will be reached in accordance with the principle of the minority obeying the majority.
"If you want to save worry and trouble, outsourcing is okay, but the prerequisite is that he must make money. People work hard to make things, and they must make money first. You have missed the benefits of our Houchen Village Elderly Care."
" Elderly people may have more choices. If I add meat dishes for five yuan, it will cost extra. There are choices."
" In addition, you have to pay for additional dishes, right? The old man won't. Now that he is saying that he is not eating well, it is definitely impossible to ask him to give out the money. "
" If you don't make money, people will tell you that you make money. It's hard to do it like this. "
After listening around, the opposition voices accounted for the majority, and the village cadres also had the answer in their minds.
Hu Xinwei: Most people still think that the original model should be used to run this senior citizen canteen. The next step is to go to the villagers' representative meeting. , according to this original model, the chef's salary will be appropriately increased, and the canteen's food fee will be appropriately increased.
Finally, after the villagers' congress approved, the Houchen Village Elderly Canteen continued the previous chef bidding model, and the monthly food fee limit was increased from 18,000. The salary was raised to 23,000 yuan, and the minimum monthly salary for chefs was also raised to 10,000 yuan. In the public bidding, Zhu Huiqing from a neighboring village successfully bid 7,000 yuan, but Chen Huayin and Chen Chunfu, the old chefs of Chencun, were unfortunately eliminated. Hu Xinwei, 46, is a native of Houchen Village. His father was Hu Wenfa, the old secretary of Houchen Village 20 years ago. He left to Houchen, in addition to the village affairs supervisory committee, an area of nearly 5 square meters. 10,000 square meters of factory buildings. At that time, the village had tens of millions of yuan in land acquisition funds. How to use this money was a top priority that affected the future of the whole village. In fact, it was generally the village cadres who had the final say. The awareness of democratic consultation was not as strong as it is now. However, during the discussion at the Village Affairs Joint Meeting, Supervisory Committee member Zhang Shenan proposed that the matter was closely related to the interests of the villagers and it was not appropriate to do so without discussion by the villagers. Ultimately, the village cadres adopted it. Zhang Shenan's suggestion held the first hearing in Houchen Village's history.
This project, which cost tens of millions of dollars that year, was successfully implemented. According to statistics in 2022, the factory rent brought an annual income of 712 to the village. Ten thousand yuan, accounting for about 93% of the village's collective operating income. For more than 20 years, it is precisely because of this that the village's collective operating income was once among the best in the county.
Hu Xinwei: Some people say that our village's collective operating income was among the best. Chen was at his peak when he debuted. He became well-known at the beginning. It was at its peak in 2004 and 2005, and then slowly it failed to catch up. Many neighboring villages did not develop as well as our village before, and gradually they all We have surpassed it.
In recent years, Zhejiang has promoted the "Thousand Villages Demonstration, Ten Thousand Villages Renovation" project, and every village in the province has gained new vitality. Although the total village collective operating income has increased year by year, it is mainly due to this. With the increase in rents and almost no decent industries, Houchen Village is now in a new dilemma. On the one hand, the villagers are eager for the development of the village, and on the other hand, the villagers of Houchen Village have a strong sense of democracy. , finding leaders who are both capable and willing to fully respect the opinions of the villagers has become a top priority for Houchen Village.
Wu Xingyong: is very famous because of Houchen Village, but from the perspective of Houchen Village itself, its development is not fast enough. At that time, the county committee also considered that in Houchen Village, you should not wait, rely on, and demand, but should speed up development. Leapfrog development.
According to regulations, village party branch secretaries are generally elected by the branch party members meeting when the branch changes, but when necessary, they can also be assigned by the higher-level party organization. In order to speed up the development of Houchen Village, in 2020, the old party secretary Hu Wenfa His son Hu Xinwei was invited back to serve as deputy secretary of the village party branch and director of the supervisory committee.
When Hu Xinwei was young, he took on engineering projects all year round. At that time, he would not have thought that one day he would take over the baton from his father in such a way.
Hu Xinwei: The organization came to talk to me in 2020 and asked me for my opinions and suggestions on village development. I felt that I was not very satisfied, so I mentioned a few things. The person I was talking to asked me to help the village for two years, but I said I didn’t have time. He said, "If you don't come to , if he doesn't come, then who can you ask to come to ?" I said you should give me at least half a year every year to go out and make some money. I want to support my family. He said it was okay, but as soon as I came in, I couldn't leave.
Wu Xingyong is the first secretary of Houchen Village. Although he is not from Houchen Village, he has served as a village cadre and village secretary, and he has a good understanding of the village conditions and public opinion of Houchen. After Hu Xinwei, he also brought Chen Jun back in 2023 to serve as the village party branch secretary.
9-year-old Chen Jun was a fire veteran. After organizational reform, he served as the emergency team leader of the largest chemical company in the county. In early 2023, despite the opposition of his family, he gave up his high-paying job and returned to the village as party branch secretary.
Wu Xingyong: Democratic elections do not mean the moment one is elected. There is a lot of work to be done before the election, and there is still a lot of work after the election. We must supervise him to perform his duties well, and he must not act indiscriminately.
html Can these three young people, 139-year-old Wu Xingyong, 39-year-old Chen Jun, and 46-year-old Hu Xinwei, take Hou Chen's "classic car" back onto the fast lane? Can they balance the speed of development with the satisfaction of the masses?Restarted Houchen: Development speed and mass satisfaction, no one can be missing
When reporters came to Houchen Village, the whole village was like a huge construction site, including rainwater and sewage diversion, tap water renovation, gas renovation, strong and weak electricity underground, etc. A series of people's livelihood projects have started one after another. They want to recover the development that was left behind in previous years as soon as possible. On the other hand, due to the large number of projects under construction, the total investment in the past two years is expected to exceed 100 million. Funds in the village are very tight, which has also brought about a series of problems.
Gongfu Industrial Park is a key project of Houchen Village's "rural organic renewal". According to the initial plan, the project will be constructed in three phases. The first phase will build a maker economy industrial park, the second phase will expand Gongfu Apartments as needed, and the third phase will It is equipped with a Gongfu commercial complex, but after more than a year of discussions in the village, the scale of the new construction was only half of the original plan. Why was there such a change, and what kind of discussions took place at that time? The reporter found the meeting minutes of the villagers’ representative meeting in December last year. Normally, the villagers’ representative meeting is held once a month, but at that time it was held twice in a row.
Gongfu Industrial Park is located in an old factory building in the village. For the older generation in the village, these old factories are of great significance, but for village cadres, they mean even greater difficulties.
Wu Xingyong: In fact, we have held a lot of consultation meetings in every aspect of because there is great ideological resistance. The elderly feel that this factory was built by Secretary Hu Wenfa only ten years ago, and within twenty years, you people want to demolish it. Are you worthy of the original cadres and the villagers? What about future dividends?
Chen Yuerong: I said that in our village, you want to demolish our factory. We rely on this factory for rent. What do we old people eat?
In fact, these standard factory buildings that were carefully built twenty years ago can no longer meet the requirements for safe production according to current policies and regulations. From the perspective of village cadres, it is imperative to introduce new ideas from the old. After countless communications, Houchencun finally reached an agreement on the issue of "whether to build it", but when discussing "how to build it", the problem arose again.
Chen Jun: Should we build ourselves or let our state-owned company help us build it? If it is built by the state-owned company, we will do a buyback ourselves. According to my opinion, the first economic pressure is not that great. There is a construction and installation cost for the construction. He promised to give us the construction and installation cost. I feel that this is a cost-effective thing, which is equivalent to them doing the construction for us. What I think is that if I work harder these past few years, I will be more comfortable in the future.
In Wuyi County, major affairs at the village level must adopt the working mechanism of "five discussions and two disclosures". The "five discussions" include suggestions from the heads of the two village committees, proposals from the village party branch meeting, deliberations by the two village committees, and review by the party members meeting. Villager representative meeting, and this time, Houchen Village also held a village head meeting based on the proposal of the villager representatives.
For village cadres, this means that they may have to face more different voices. According to Wu Xingyong's recollection, the process at that time was quite intense.
Wu Xingyong: is an on-site face-to-face communication and interactive conference. This conference is actually well held and is very helpful for the development of a village. The whole process of people's democracy, where is democracy reflected? Democracy with the participation of a few people is not called democracy, only the participation of the majority is called democracy.
Every morning at around 7 o'clock, Chen Liangui and the others would come to the construction site. He was a mass supervisor. In order to strengthen the supervision of various construction projects in the village, the village decided to add mass supervisors on the basis of the supervisory committee.
Chen Jun: Villages are managed by the villagers, allowing ordinary people to participate in the quality supervision of this project.
People who have been busy all day can finally slow down and enjoy the beauty of life. Chen Jun and Hu Xinwei both live in the village. After dinner, in addition to villagers coming to report the situation, they will go to the village to take a look.
"Village officials" are elected by villagers, village policies are determined by villagers, village affairs are managed by villagers, and village affairs are managed by villagers. If they want to implement these words into practice and realize the whole process of people's democracy, they have a long way to go.
Editor and Director丨He Fang
Camera丨Li Ji Gao Shuai
Assisting Reporters丨Jiang Lingding He Can Leilei
Wuyi County Media Center assisted in shooting
