When Xixinan village in rural China became an internet sensation in 2023, its fairy-tale greenery drew crowds but also posed a dilemma: how to generate revenue without entrance fees and ensure neighboring villages shared the benefits. The answer, as documented in a new episode of People's Daily's video series Decoding Rural China's Governance, lies in a six-village tourism network that pools resources and distributes gains equitably. The episode, titled One Green Haven, Six Linked Villages, was distributed via Media OutReach Newswire.
The network includes Xixinan and five nearby villages, each offering distinct attractions: bamboo raft rides, a sightseeing train, homestays, and nighttime fish-lantern tours. By connecting these experiences into a single travel route, the cluster encourages visitors to linger and spend more, allowing a wider array of local businesses to benefit. Instead of competing for tourists, the villages have adopted a cooperative approach, developing complementary businesses and sharing opportunities.
Central to this cooperation is a revenue-sharing model: 70 percent of earnings go to the village where a business operates, 20 percent is distributed according to original equity ratios (Xixinan takes 5 percent, the other five villages 3 percent each), and 10 percent is retained by the town's operating company as working capital. This mechanism incentivizes each village to cultivate its own distinctive offerings while ensuring that all share in the collective success.
The results are striking. More than 70 percent of residents in the town now work in tourism, and in 2025 each village generated over 1 million yuan (about $140,000) in revenue. The model has helped spread the benefits of tourism across the entire town, turning online virality into sustained rural development.
The implications extend beyond this single cluster. As rural communities across China seek to capitalize on sudden online attention, the six-village model offers a replicable framework for avoiding the pitfalls of cutthroat competition and uneven development. By linking natural scenery, connected tourism routes, and a shared-interest mechanism, the villages show how visitor traffic can be converted into broad-based prosperity. This approach aligns with broader efforts to strengthen grassroots governance and promote coordinated rural revitalization, providing a glimpse of how local communities can work together to share opportunities and improve livelihoods.
