When Xixinan village in rural China became a social media sensation in 2023, its fairy-tale greenery drew crowds but also raised a dilemma: how to profit without charging entrance fees and how to ensure neighboring villages benefit rather than compete. The answer, according to a new episode of People’s Daily’s video series Decoding Rural China’s Governance, lies in a six-village tourism network that is turning viral fame into shared prosperity.
The episode, titled One Green Haven, Six Linked Villages, explores how Xixinan and five nearby villages have formed a cluster to develop complementary attractions, including bamboo raft rides, a sightseeing train, homestays, and nighttime fish-lantern tours. By connecting these experiences into a single travel route, the network encourages visitors to stay longer and spend more, allowing more local businesses to benefit from the growing tourist traffic. The series, which examines grassroots governance and rural development across China, highlights how the villages moved from competition to collaboration. Rather than vying for the same visitors, they embraced a cluster development approach that links tourism resources and shares opportunities.
Central to this cooperation is a revenue-sharing model that distributes earnings equitably. Under the mechanism, 70 percent of revenue goes to the village where a business operates, 20 percent is distributed according to the original equity ratio—with Xixinan taking 5 percent and the other five villages taking 3 percent each—and 10 percent is retained by the town’s operating company as working capital. This structure allows all six villages to benefit from shared tourism resources while encouraging each to develop its own distinctive businesses.
The results are tangible. More than 70 percent of residents in the town now work in tourism, and in 2025, each village generated more than 1 million yuan (about $140,000) in revenue. The model helps ensure that the benefits of tourism are spread across the town rather than concentrated in a single village. As reported via Media OutReach Newswire, the video follows the journey from Xixinan’s viral rise to the broader transformation of the six villages, demonstrating how natural scenery, connected tourism routes, and a shared-interest mechanism can convert visitor traffic into wider rural development.
By linking six villages into a development cluster, the model offers a glimpse of how rural communities in China are exploring new ways to share opportunities and prosperity. It addresses a common challenge in rural tourism: the risk that a single viral destination may overshadow its neighbors, leading to uneven growth. The six-village approach suggests that cooperation and revenue sharing can mitigate such disparities, providing a potential blueprint for other regions seeking to harness online attention for collective benefit.
