Fuqing miracles - Following a Fuqing friend

Wenbin Yuan

Chapter One:

Fuqing — From Extreme Poverty to Extravagant Prosperity in Thirty Years
Following My Friend Cai Back to His Remote Hometown

By Wenbin Yuan

Written on Thanksgiving Day, 2025 — with gratitude to my friends, relatives, former colleagues, employees, suppliers, subcontractors, bankers, insurance agents, and to my two daughters, who endured being overlooked through their school years yet grew up resilient and thriving. What does not kill you truly makes you stronger.

A short video once went viral online with a bold claim: “The world fears Americans, and Americans fear the people of Fuqing.”
It sounded exaggerated, even humorous — but behind the humor was a surprising truth.

In the 1990s, the Chinese government at times hesitated to issue passports to people from Fuqing, and the U.S. Embassy was equally cautious in granting them visas. The reason was simple: too many Fuqing natives had left for Europe, Africa, Pacific islands, and the Americas, often through irregular channels, often with nothing but determination. They arrived as some of the poorest immigrants — and then, two or three decades later, emerged as some of the wealthiest residents and most influential local citizens in their adopted countries.

Inside China, people developed a peculiar indicator for economic vibrancy: count how many Fuqing people have settled in a city. The logic was brutal but accurate — if Fuqing entrepreneurs are doing business there, the local economy is probably booming. If they are absent, the region is likely stagnant. Northeastern China is a classic example: the area has almost no Fuqing presence, and it suffered a 10% population decline from 2010 to 2020 during a decade when the rest of China was leaping forward.

This makes the story of Fuqing all the more astonishing.

Only thirty years ago, Fuqing — a small coastal region in Fujian province, facing Taiwan across the strait — was among the poorest places in China. Its people were mostly peasants with scant land, virtually no natural resources, and one of the lowest per-capita land ratios in the nation. Yet today, Fuqing stands proudly as one of the three richest counties in China. Its skyline bristles with new towers, its suburbs sprawl with colossal mansions, and its county center boasts not one but two gigantic Wanda Plazas.

Few places on earth have transformed so dramatically in such a short time.

A symbol of this transformation is Fuyao Glass, the world’s largest automotive glass manufacturer. Its founder, Cao Dewang, is a son of Fuqing — a man who completed only five years of elementary school and began life as a poor farmer. Fuyao now generates over five billion dollars in annual revenue and operates massive plants around the world, including the flagship facility in Ohio featured in the Oscar-winning documentary American Factory.

Yet Cao’s greatest legacy in Fuqing may not be industrial. It may be personal, even spiritual. After decades of building factories across the globe, he recently donated one billion RMB, roughly $1.4 billion USD, to establish Fuyao University and another 300 million RMB to restore an ancient local temple dating back to the year 800 AD. The donation fulfilled a promise he had made to the Buddha during his hardest entrepreneurial years in the 1980s — a vow from a struggling young man who never forgot where he came from and his promises to his people and Buddha.

Chapter Two:

A People Scattered Across the World**

The outward migration of Fuqing people began in earnest in the mid-1980s, when China first relaxed its passport restrictions. By the early 1990s, as economic reforms deepened and peasants were finally allowed to travel for factory and construction work, the floodgates opened. Fuqing’s young men and women — restless, resourceful, and hungry for opportunity — stepped onto ships and planes and never looked back, when majority of the migrant peasants merely had the courage to move to SE coastal cities where American and other western businessmen started moving entire assembly lines into cities like Shenzhen, Dongguang, Haikou and Suzhou, transforming these small towns of a few hundred thousand people into mega cities of over ten million.

Most of the residents of these new cities are peasants immigrated from poor countryside like Fuqing. They worked their butt off every day in the construction sites or newly built assembly lines, making China’s economy from merely $0.4 trillion in 1990 to about $20 trillion USD in 2024, over 40 fold growth in 34 years! Now their city retirees are enjoying a average pension of close to that of US retirees purchasing power (about $1000 USD a month) and the peasant retirees are getting an average of $30 a month pension, or 30 times less, so the government is not going to be burdened by its own version of social security spending like the US which spends trillions to its social security equally to its retiree and is on its way to a bankruptcy if not changed.

Part of this mobility traces back to geography and history. Fuqing lies just sixty-eight kilometers across the water from Taiwan, and for centuries its families maintained informal ties, trade links, and migration routes across the strait. Almost everyone in Fuqing speaks standard Mandarin, making it far easier for them to integrate wherever they landed. Over the course of a generation, nearly half of the entire population found their way abroad — to the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and even the far-flung Pacific islands.

Among these destinations, the Pacific islands and Africa became the places where Fuqing settlers thrived most spectacularly. In many of these regions, they came to dominate local infrastructure projects, commerce, retail supply chains, transportation networks, and more. They became, in effect, economic colonists — filling a vacuum that Western countries had little interest in filling due to harsh living conditions and unstable political climates. While global powers expressed discomfort, they also lacked the will to compete. The Fuqing migrants simply went where others refused to go, and they built empires there.

Their success was not accidental. It came from a unique combination of cultural habits and hard-earned strategies.

One key advantage was the collective financing system they developed — a kind of grassroots, trust-based private equity model. Families and friends pooled money to launch large ventures, and each investor took responsibility for a specific part of the operation. These arrangements required iron-clad trust, something notoriously rare in much of China’s business culture. But in Fuqing, trust was not only possible; it was the foundation of everything. Profits were distributed with remarkable transparency, enabling teams to stay united, disciplined, and “all-in” for the long haul.

Another advantage was their exceptional resilience. Fuqing entrepreneurs learned how to survive in the harshest conditions — whether living above their retail shops in dusty African towns or running businesses in remote island nations with unreliable electricity. They endured storms, coups, economic collapses, and personal hardships with a calm that outsiders often found bewildering.

But perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Fuqing’s success lies in its social infrastructure back home: the thousands of tea houses scattered across every alley and street. These are not merely places to drink tea — they are the nerve centers of information, trust-building, and collective strategy. Many are owned by entrepreneurs who delegate their day-to-day business operations to partners, freeing themselves to spend hours each day in conversation.

Inside these tea houses, business owners exchange intelligence about markets, discuss failures and successes, study which industries are rising or falling, and evaluate opportunities at home and abroad. News travels through this network faster than through any official channel.

In a sense, the global reach of Fuqing begins right there — over endless cups of tea, in the low murmur of conversation, in the daily ritual of listening and sharing. These simple gatherings shape decisions that ripple outward across continents.

By the time a Fuqing entrepreneur sets foot in Africa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, or New York, they are already equipped with something priceless:
a community that functions like a global radar syst

Chapter Three:

Barometers of the World Economy**

Fuqing is home to only about 1.5 million people—but on any given day, the county itself feels half-empty. Most of its residents live and work abroad, while many of those who remain spend their working years in other provinces, returning home only for holidays or for the great social events that bind Fuqing society together.

It was one of these events that brought me here with Cai: a three-day wedding celebration. The scale of it shook me to my core. The ceremonies were lavishly staged, the proceedings executed with professional precision, and the banquets—held night after night—overflowed with delicacies fit for royalty. This was not merely a wedding; it was a statement about what Fuqing had become. Attendees came without any gifts and they came with large beautifully decorated modern busses and casual dresses.

Amid the fireworks, lavish and romantic staging and fresh cut flowers that cost tens of thousands dollars, live western music bands, and endless toasts, I suddenly understood something: Fuqing people are barometers of the world economy.

Their real classrooms are not universities, and their real MBA programs do not require textbooks or case studies. Instead, Fuqing has built its own perpetual business school—run not by professors but by entrepreneurs who teach one another continuously, openly, and, most remarkably, honestly. There is no pretense, no secrecy for the sake of ego, no shame in failure. Every success story becomes a lesson; every misstep becomes shared wisdom during the wedding activities, tea houses chat, religious ceremonies, and frequent visits to friends and relatives. Their bonds are wide, trusting and enduring among relatives and classmates.

This network schooling may be informal, but it rivals the best business schools on earth. From these conversations emerge enterprises that spread across continents. Not high tech, not venture-funded—rather, the kinds of brick-and-mortar businesses that others overlook or cannot manage profitably. Fuqing people thrive in these fields because they excel where it matters most: organizing teams, sharing information, securing resources, and making decisions quickly and collectively.

In many ways, they resemble the legendary Jin merchants of Shanxi—the financial pioneers who built early banking networks in the Qing Dynasty. But the Fuqing model is more adaptive, more flexible, and far more rooted in group trust and real-time information sharing. Their organizational instincts have evolved into something uniquely powerful.

What truly sets Fuqing entrepreneurs apart is their fearlessness. They act boldly, scale aggressively, and move in coordinated groups of trusted partners—nearly always fellow Fuqing natives. When they commit to a business, they commit fully, drawing strength from a shared culture of risk-taking, loyalty, and mutual responsibility.

Wherever they go—Africa, Europe, the Americas, or remote island nations—they bring with them this invisible machinery: a system of intelligence gathering, collective financing, moral trust, and relentless drive. That system allows them to sense global economic shifts long before others do. It also allows them to seize opportunities with astonishing speed.

In that sense, Fuqing is not merely a county.
It is a global economic vibrancy indicator—a living gauge of where the world’s commerce is flowing and where it is about to move next.

And at the center of this phenomenon are people like those I met at the wedding: confident, collaborative, courageous—businesspeople who see farther, share honestly, move faster, and act together.

Chapter Four:

Cai — The Youngest of Eight Siblings Rising From Ten Yuan a Month**

Cai was the youngest child in a family of eight. Today, his siblings are scattered across the world—running businesses in Australia, Spain, Latin America, and the United States. Their paths diverged geographically, but they all carried the same Fuqing spirit of grit and entrepreneurship.

One of Cai’s older sisters illustrates this perfectly. Her husband, now settled in Guangxi thousands of miles away, runs both a construction company and an eel hatchery. When I casually asked about the size of his construction business, he replied with a humble smile, “Oh, just small fish—only five billion RMB.” In Fuqing culture, understatement is an art form.

Cai had invited me to visit his hometown for many years, but life kept getting in the way. It wasn’t until late October of 2025 that we finally made the journey together. Our stories had unfolded on parallel tracks: I left China in 1987 to pursue graduate studies in the United States, while Cai left Fuqing in 1995, beginning his American life in Milwaukee as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant.

Even in 1995, China was still desperately poor. Its GDP was barely 5% of the United States’, despite having nearly six times the population. For young people like Cai, the path forward felt narrow and suffocating. The world beyond China’s borders shimmered with possibility.

Here is Cai standing in front of the gate to his village—a place nearly unchanged for centuries, yet transformed almost beyond recognition today.

What struck me most as we walked through the village was how unimaginable the past now seemed.

In 1995, Fuqing was still an impoverished rural county with almost no arable land. The average peasant family of seven survived on less than an acre of rocky soil, producing barely enough food to live—sometimes as little as ten cents RMB a day in value under the old commune system. Meanwhile, American workers were earning nearly $3 an hour, a wage differential of nearly 500 times.

Cai’s family—five sisters, two brothers, and two parents—lived on the equivalent of ten yuan per month. There were no subsidies, no safety nets. Worse, they were obligated to deliver their finest produce to the government for free under the jiaogongliang public grain quota system. The food was then sold at a profit to urban residents with city hukou, while peasants bore the burden of production and loss.

Movement was restricted by the hukou system. A peasant could not simply leave for the city without a permit. Most of Cai’s village lived in a cycle of debt and confusion. Old villagers told me that every year-end, no matter how hard they worked, their commune account was mysteriously in the negative. They asked me why. I had no simple answer.

I had lived similar days myself. In the late 1970s, as an “educated youth” sent down to the countryside during the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, I too was a farmer. Decades later, we are still asking the same question: Why did it have to be that way?

But nothing prepared me for what I saw next.

We entered Cai’s village expecting modest rural homes. Instead, what rose before us were palatial mansions—lofty four- and five-story residences, beautifully decorated, standing tall and proud like modern temples of prosperity. Many were larger and grander than the mansions of Beverly Hills. They seemed to announce, silently and emphatically:

This is what Fuqing has become.

To think that these towering estates were built by families who once lived on ten yuan a month was almost impossible to comprehend. Yet here they stood—symbols of a transformation so profound that it could only have been forged by generations of sacrifice, ambition, and relentless resilience

Chapter Five

Cai — The Youngest of Eight Siblings Rising From Ten Yuan a Month

Cai was the youngest child in a family of eight. Today, his siblings are scattered across the world—running businesses in Australia, Spain, Latin America, and the United States. Their paths diverged geographically, but they all carried the same Fuqing spirit of grit and entrepreneurship.

One of Cai’s older sisters illustrates this perfectly. Her husband, now settled in Guangxi thousands of miles away, runs both a construction company and an eel hatchery. When I casually asked about the size of his construction business, he replied with a humble smile, “Oh, just small fish—only five billion RMB.” In Fuqing culture, understatement is an art form.

Cai had invited me to visit his hometown for many years, but life kept getting in the way. It wasn’t until late October of 2025 that we finally made the journey together. Our stories had unfolded on parallel tracks: I left China in 1987 to pursue graduate studies in the United States, while Cai left Fuqing in 1995, beginning his American life in Milwaukee as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant.

Even in 1995, China was still desperately poor. Its GDP was barely 5% of the United States’, despite having nearly six times the population. For young people like Cai, the path forward felt narrow and suffocating. The world beyond China’s borders shimmered with possibility.

Here is Cai standing in front of the gate to his village—a place nearly unchanged for centuries, yet transformed almost beyond recognition today.

What struck me most as we walked through the village was how unimaginable the past now seemed.

In 1995, Fuqing was still an impoverished rural county with almost no arable land. The average peasant family of seven survived on less than an acre of rocky soil, producing barely enough food to live—sometimes as little as ten cents RMB a day in value under the old commune system. Meanwhile, American workers were earning nearly $3 an hour, a wage differential of nearly 500 times.

Cai’s family—five sisters, two brothers, and two parents—lived on the equivalent of ten yuan per month. There were no subsidies, no safety nets. Worse, they were obligated to deliver their finest produce to the government for free under the jiaogongliang public grain quota system. The food was then sold at a profit to urban residents with city hukou, while peasants bore the burden of production and loss.

Movement was restricted by the hukou system. A peasant could not simply leave for the city without a permit. Most of Cai’s village lived in a cycle of debt and confusion. Old villagers told me that every year-end, no matter how hard they worked, their commune account was mysteriously in the negative. They asked me why. I had no simple answer.

I had lived similar days myself. In the late 1970s, as an “educated youth” sent down to the countryside during the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, I too was a farmer. Decades later, we are still asking the same question: Why did it have to be that way?


But nothing prepared me for what I saw next.

We entered Cai’s village expecting modest rural homes. Instead, what rose before us were palatial mansions—lofty four- and five-story residences, beautifully decorated, standing tall and proud like modern temples of prosperity. Many were larger and grander than the mansions of Beverly Hills. They seemed to announce, silently and emphatically:

This is what Fuqing has become.

To think that these towering estates were built by families who once lived on ten yuan a month was almost impossible to comprehend. Yet here they stood—symbols of a transformation so profound that it could only have been forged by generations of sacrifice, ambition, and relentless resilience

Chapter Six

Fuqing at the Crossroads Between Two Worlds

Fuqing sits at a geographic and emotional crossroads—only seventy kilometers across the Taiwan Strait from an island once far wealthier than the mainland, and still linked by family ties, shared dialects, and centuries of migration. Yet today, the connection feels fragile and remote.

A massive ferry terminal, built with great hope to facilitate cross-strait exchange, stands empty. Construction of a grand bridge on the mainland side—meant to span the strait someday—was nearly completed, only to be abandoned when the political winds shifted after Taiwan’s Minjin Party took power five years ago.

Nearby, the newly built Haitong Ancient City, a sprawling $5-billion tourism and commerce district designed to attract Taiwanese visitors, has become a ghost town—its elegant stone archways and storefronts echoing with absence, a monument to ambition at the wrong moment.

Most of the owners of the village mansions are elderly—people in their sixties, seventies, and beyond—while their children and younger siblings have long since left for Australia, Ireland, England, Spain, Africa, or the Pacific islands. Their absence is felt in every quiet street. The enormous houses they built with overseas earnings stand mostly empty, like shells of prosperity.

Many mansions lack proper landscaping; some never even saw their interiors fully completed. But completion was never the point. To the villagers, these grand homes serve a deeper purpose: they are symbols of filial piety—proof that their children have succeeded abroad and have honored the family.

In a small Fuqing village, face is everything. To own a mansion is to declare to the world, “My family has risen.” To not have one invites embarrassment so severe it can wound the spirit. To outsiders, especially Americans, this may seem trivial. But here, social dignity has always been hard-won, and pride is intimately tied to survival.

Yet everyone knows the truth: the children will never return to farm this land. They live prosperous lives elsewhere and send money home out of love and duty. When this older generation is gone, the villages of Fuqing may empty completely. What Pu Songling once described in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio—cities inhabited only by ghosts—may become a reality here within a decade or two.

Walking through these majestic yet half-inhabited mansions, I found myself wondering whether the Roman Empire fell for similar reasons—pouring energy into monumental buildings, roads, arches, aqueducts, and baths. I once asked ChatGPT this question. The answer was simple and res

No.


Prosperity alone does not doom a civilization. Other forces must be at play.

But the thought lingered.

Revenge Spending

At the three-day wedding I attended in Fuqing, I witnessed a form of spending that bordered on theatrical—an open declaration of success meant for all to see.

The first day alone, the send-off ceremony for the bride, was orchestrated with a level of professional detail fitting for a royal procession. The bride’s rented dress—worn only for a few hours—cost 50,000 RMB. Relatives lined up to present gifts: stacks of cash from 10,000 RMB to checks of two million, along with gold necklaces, bangles, and rings. The purpose was unmistakable: to ensure the bride entered her marriage radiant with wealth, security, and status.

Upon arriving at the groom’s home, it is customary for his family to match or double whatever the bride received—often amounting to several million RMB. This wedding was considered extravagant but not abnormal. And at the very top, some weddings have become national sensations for their excess.

The most famous example is the wedding of Fuqing native Cao Dewang’s daughter. Reports estimate:
• Direct event costs: several million USD
• Total value including dowry: between $100 million and $500 million

A single wedding rivaling the budget of a small corporation.


The Roots of Extravagance

Such extravagance might seem bewildering—until one remembers that Fuqing people were desperately poor just thirty years ago. Many fled to other provinces or to distant continents, often facing hardship, humiliation, and discrimination. When they achieved success, they sent money home—not only to improve their parents’ lives but to erase decades of shame and humiliation they experienced due to poverty.

Cai’s family is a perfect example. Thirty years ago, their total income as a family of eight children was about three U.S. dollars a month. They survived by selling longan and betel nut from their half-acre yard, relying on every fruit the land could provide.

At the same time, the U.S. minimum wage was about $4.50 an hour—the equivalent of a Fuqing family’s monthly income under the commune system. No wonder nearly half the people of Fuqing left and no wonder they worked ferociously hard abroad. No wonder they tried so hard to lift their parents out of hardship with dignity and respect.

Chapter Seven

New “Ancient towns” like what is shown in the video that cost $5b to $10b usd to build are popping up in Pingpu of Fuqing, Jinyuan of Taiyuan and almost every middle sized city in China to bull doze old town or villages and build gigantic new old towns to showcase their old styles. However, most of them are ghost towns that have more buildings and shops than the people inside.

Why not let the indigenous people stay to make them real towns? Why move these poor peasants out of the place they lived for so many generations with great traditions to preserve and erase them, only to compensate them with mere 300 RMB a month as retirement income that is merely 1/30 of a regular city retiree? Who are going to pay the billions of dollars per year for the maintenance where there are no tourists coming? How was the decision made to spend so much money with no return of investment?

I only visited two less than ten year old “Ancient Town” and did not see enough number of tourists to match the thousands of buildings made of “ancient styles”. I believe these ghost towns that were supposed to be tourist attractions or cultural old towns will bankrupt the local municipalities and get the peasants who immigrated out of the original places angry when promised returns are not fulfilled.

Most economists wrongly speculated China’s economy before and I truly hope I am wrong this time, too.

Summary

What Does Not Kill You Makes You Stronger — The Fuqing Experiment

There is a phrase I have carried with me through my years abroad:
“What does not kill you makes you stronger.”

Nowhere is this more true than in the story of the Fuqing people.

For decades, Fuqing was a land pressed to the very edge of survival—rocky soil, thin harvests, forced quotas, and families living on ten yuan a month. That kind of hardship does not build comfort; it builds a certain fire in the human spirit. It sharpens judgment, forces collaboration, and breeds a fearlessness that is rare and unmistakable.

What the world sees today—the global businesses, the sprawling mansions, the billion-yuan wedding dowries—is only the surface. Underneath lies a deeper truth:
Fuqing’s success is the product of historical pressure, collective memory, and trauma turned into drive.

These people were not merely motivated.
They were forged.

The Hardship Engine

The Fuqing formula for success was simple, but not easy:
• Grow up with nothing.
• Trust the few people who stood with you in your hardest times.
• Leave home with certainty that failure means returning to the same poverty you escaped.
• Work abroad where every risk is better than staying put.
• Pool money because no one else will help you.
• Share information because ignorance means starvation.
• Build fast, adjust fast, and endure what others refuse to endure.

From this emerged a global network—Africa, Europe, Australia, Latin America, the Pacific—held together not by capital or formal agreements but by shared suffering and mutual obligation.

They became, as I have said before,
barometers of the world economy—
moving where opportunities moved, sensing shifts earlier than others, and acting with collective precision.

But Success Changes the Soil

Yet here is the paradox every civilization eventually faces:

The very conditions that create greatness rarely survive prosperity.

This is the lesson of the Jin merchants of Shanxi—the legendary bankers of the late Qing dynasty who built a financial empire across China. They rose through hardship: long caravans, dangerous trade routes, and a culture that valued trust more than life itself.

But their descendants grew up with comfort, security, and access.
The skill of reading roads was replaced by the luxury of staying home.
The networks weakened.
The instinct hardened by scarcity softened with time.
Within a few generations, the Jin banking empire disappeared, leaving only museums and stories.

The same pattern is beginning in Fuqing.

The Next Generation Will Not Repeat the Past

Most children of Fuqing’s global migrants are growing up in Sydney, Madrid, London, Dublin, Los Angeles, or Johannesburg. They speak fluent English or Spanish, attend good schools, and enjoy stable lives. They do not know the sting of hunger, the humiliation of sending grain to the government while eating scraps, or the anxiety of leaving home with borrowed money and no safety net.

And because they do not know these pains,
they will not reproduce the same fire.

They will succeed, perhaps—but not in the same explosive, risk-driven, all-or-nothing way their parents did. They will have options. They will choose comfort, balance, and security because that is the natural progression of every immigrant story.

Meanwhile, the grand mansions in Fuqing villages will slowly empty.
The elderly owners will pass away.
The children will remain abroad.
The villages will fade into quiet, just as the Jin merchant towns did.

It is not tragedy.
It is the rhythm of history.

The Fuqing Era Was a Moment in Time

The success of the Fuqing people was not accidental.
It was a rare convergence of hardship, timing, courage, and collective effort—
a phenomenon as unique as it was powerful.

But like all such phenomena,
it belongs to a particular moment in history.

The next generation will chart its own course, shaped not by survival but by opportunity. They will likely prosper in other ways—digitally, culturally, academically—but the era of Fuqing’s “global warriors of commerce” is unlikely to repeat itself.

For now, we can honor this remarkable generation with a simple truth:

They survived what should have broken them.
And because it did not kill them,
it made them stronger than anyone expected.

This is the legacy of Fuqing—
a testament to resilience, trust, and the extraordinary results born from extraordinary adversity.