Autumn 1985, plains of Henan Province.
Chen Jianguo, the 34-year-old village party secretary, suffered a heart attack due to overwork at a celebration banquet when he led the villagers to divide fields into households and build a brick factory. He collapsed in front of the kiln fire he had lit personally.
When he opened his eyes, he was back in 1980, when the policy of allocating land to households had just spread to this large village of 3,000 people.
In his last life, he was a man of action driven by the tide of the times. He accomplished great things, but he also ran into many pitfalls - he was cheated out of money by his partners, stuck by policies, cheated out of contracts by foreign investors, and watched township enterprises grow from sparks to blossoming, and then from blossoming to bankruptcy.
In this life, he came back with thirty years of business wisdom and foresight of the times.
While others are still waiting to see the policy, he has begun to consolidate land; others have just learned how to grow greenhouses, and he has already deployed deep processing of agricultural products; others have begun to establish township enterprises, and he is already preparing to build brands, run channels, and build cold chains; others finally understand the market, and his business territory has begun to extend to urban commercial real estate and retail terminals.
This is not the story of one person getting rich, but the evolution of a village, a county, and an era.
Starting from three acres of experimental fields, we gradually built an agricultural empire covering planting, breeding, processing, logistics, retail, and real estate.
But Chen Jianguo knows that the real battlefield is never between the fields, but in the game of people's hearts, the undercurrent of the times, and the struggle of capital.
