When Xixinan village in China went viral in 2023, its fairy-tale greenery drew crowds but also raised a critical question: how could the community benefit without charging entrance fees, and how could it avoid competing with its neighbors? The answer, according to a new video series by People's Daily, lies in a collaborative model that links six villages into a single tourism network.
The series, Decoding Rural China's Governance, explores grassroots governance and rural development across China. Its latest episode, One Green Haven, Six Linked Villages, follows the six-village tourism cluster and shows how online attention is being converted into shared opportunity. As reported by Media OutReach Newswire, the villages have developed complementary attractions—bamboo raft rides, a sightseeing train, homestays, and nighttime fish-lantern tours—to create a complete travel route that encourages visitors to stay longer and spend more.
Rather than competing for visitors, the villages adopted a cluster development approach, connecting tourism resources and sharing opportunities. Central to this cooperation is a revenue-sharing model: 70 percent of revenue goes to the village where a business operates, 20 percent is distributed according to the original equity ratio (Xixinan takes 5 percent and the other five villages take 3 percent each), and 10 percent is retained by the town's operating company as working capital. This mechanism allows all six villages to benefit from shared tourism resources while still encouraging each to develop its own distinctive businesses.
The impact is significant. More than 70 percent of residents in the town now work in tourism. In 2025, each village generated more than 1 million yuan (about $140,000) in revenue, helping ensure that the benefits of tourism are shared across the town. The video traces 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 turn visitor traffic into broader rural development.
This story matters because it offers a replicable model for rural communities worldwide. Many rural areas struggle to capitalize on sudden fame without causing inequality or overdevelopment. The six-village cluster shows that cooperation and equitable revenue distribution can turn a viral moment into sustainable prosperity, providing a glimpse of how rural China is exploring new ways to share opportunities and prosperity.
