BEIJING, April 23 (Xinhua) -- In Sozhug, a high-altitude township in southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region where families have harvested potatoes from thin soil for generations, a young entrepreneur did something few expected.
Standing on the observation deck of Beijing's iconic Bird's Nest stadium last week, 28-year-old Cering Chophel looked out over a city he was visiting for the first time.
He thought of the rutted mountain roads back home, the tractors groaning under sacks of potatoes, and the villagers who had trusted him with a question he couldn't shake: "You went to college. You started a business. Can you help us?"
Cering had once chased a different kind of future. After graduating from a normal college in the eastern city of Nantong, he returned home for a substitute teaching post, a job that paid about 2,000 yuan a month, roughly 291 U.S. dollars. The work kept him afloat, but it never felt like enough. He wanted to put down roots at home and gather strength for something larger.
In 2022, without telling his father, he resigned, scraped together 300,000 yuan from relatives and friends, and opened a small grocery store in Sozhug. Not long, the shop was pulling in 3,000 to 4,000 yuan a day, enough to repay half his debts. Yet the real pull came from the fields outside his door.
Sozhug's potatoes are a local point of pride -- thin-skinned, dense with starch and ripened under the fierce plateau sun. But they arrived late to market, after prices had already collapsed elsewhere. Farmers bounced for more than an hour on tractor seats to sell their crop in town for as little as 2 to 4 yuan a kilogram, a pittance after fuel and labor.
Cering had watched his own parents bend over those furrows year after year to send him to school. When neighbors asked if he could find a better way, he hesitated. His store was new. He had no agricultural training. But the sight of stooped backs in the potato fields kept pulling him forward.
In the summer of 2024, he made a bold move to register a brand named Yalong Wenba Potatoes. He organized 89 households to plant 150 mu, about 10 hectares. The harvest totaled 217 tonnes. Sales reached 2.17 million yuan, with 1.08 million yuan distributed as dividends to villagers and the highest single household receiving more than 20,000 yuan.
"Before, one mu might bring 5,000 yuan," Cering said. "Now it's around 10,000 yuan. When we handed out the dividends, many people were in tears."
The change was not magical. It was branding, collective effort and a promise that farmers could focus on growing while Cering's company handled the rest. "Now the villagers just plant," he said. "We take care of the sales."
This April, Cering joined 46 other leaders of farmers' and herdsmen's cooperatives in Xizang on a study tour in Beijing. In Longtou Village of Daxing District, he saw tofu and decorative bun workshops transformed into rural tourism draws, linking households, the collective and industries. At tech exhibitions, drones, self-driving vehicles and other autonomous equipment suggested a future where plateau farming might rely less on aching muscles.
"I saw that smart machines can free people from labor," he said. "That's the power of innovation. The potato business can't just be about hard work. It has to be smart."
The trip, Cering said, was an eye-opener. He returned to Xizang with a notebook full of ideas and a sense that the road ahead could be wider than he had imagined. Earlier this year, his company leased another 73 mu of land to test new potato varieties. He hopes to bring more households into the fold.
An older villager, in his 80s, once told him, "You've done what no one dared to do for years. But your strength is bigger than this. You can help more than those 89 families. Make this industry strong. That's what young people should do."
For Cering, the words still echo. He often thinks of the gravel roads that have become smooth asphalt ones, the earthen houses replaced by tidy Tibetan homes, people's wallets bulging. What has not changed, he said, is the resilience of the plateau and the stubborn desire of its young people to build a future on their own land.
As the train pulled out of Beijing West Railway Station, carrying him and the other cooperative leaders back toward Lhasa, Cering pressed his face to the window. The spring light of the Chinese capital, he knew, could not be carried home. But the lessons about branding, technology, and what a village can become when people work together, felt like seeds.
And on the highlands along the Yarlung Zangbo River, he intends to plant them. ■
