From a pair of scissors to industrial empowerment: Twenty years of people's livelihood answers from the "Shexiang Mountain Flower" in Shexiang, southwestern Zhejiang

China News Service, Lishui, September 13 (Hu Fengsheng) Among the vast mountains in southwestern Zhejiang, 823 natural villages are scattered deep in more than 700 mountains. This is the only She autonomous county in the country - Jingning. The large number of left-behind elderly people, scattered villages, and long service radius are long-term livelihood issues faced by this land.

Twenty years ago, a pair of hair scissors was stuffed into a line patrol bag and cut from one village to another. Twenty years later, this small initiative that started as "Shunshouyibang" has grown into a red service matrix led by the "Shexiang Shanhua" brand.

In August this year, the State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power (Jingning Dongkeng) Red Boat Communist Party Member Service Team (referred to as the "Service Team") was awarded the Outstanding Red Boat Communist Party Member Service Team of the State Grid Corporation. When team leader Zhou Lixia took home the medal from Beijing, she remembered the words of a She ethnic woman: "Your mountain flowers are the flowers of our own family."

From "a pair of scissors" to "a square position"

The starting point of "Shexiang Mountain Flowers" was so simple that it could hardly be considered a "project".

In 2006, Zhang Jianming, the first captain of the service team and the most beautiful volunteer in Zhejiang Province, discovered that it was inconvenient for the left-behind elderly people in the mountains to have haircuts while patrolling, so he took the scissors with him and cut them in every village he went to. This cut lasted more than ten years. Scissors can solve "trivial matters", but they cannot cut away the people's livelihood problems in the mountains.

Aunt Zhong’s antihypertensive medicine, Uncle Lei’s rice oil, and Grandma Slan’s certificate processing—these detailed and real expectations were recorded in pocket notepads by the team members, and gradually settled into a constantly updated “list of people’s needs.”

What really made the service move from "occasional" to "daily" was an old desk. When the service team was first established, an old desk was their complete set of possessions for carrying out safety publicity, voluntary haircuts, and recording people's sentiments at the entrance of the village. This "mobile old table" carries the original intention, but it also exposes its shortcomings: limited space, low efficiency, and inconvenience for the masses.

The turning point occurred in the advancement of positional construction. The service team strives for multi-party coordination to build Zhejiang Province's first government-enterprise jointly listed electric power new era civilized practice station in Dajun Scenic Area, and then expands the "government, electronics, bank and mail" outlets, forming 121 "fixed + mobile" service points covering Jingning, which can handle 109 convenient services in one stop. From an old table that needs to be moved at any time to 121 service nodes that have taken root, the accessibility and stability of services have undergone qualitative changes.

Numbers record the weight of this change: a total of 12,000 agency services of various types have been accepted, more than 3,200 door-to-door services have been provided to special groups, more than 80,000 tourists have been served by the "Chong Ke Dian Er" project, and the State Grid Corporation's second prize for ideological and political research achievements in 2025 - behind these recognitions is a mountainous county's continuous solution to "how services reach the last mile."

From "life security" to "industrial empowerment"

If the story of "Shexiang Mountain Flower" ends with haircuts and agency services, it would be a heartwarming collection at best. But a “crossover” in 2016 changed the direction of this curve.

That summer, hundreds of acres of wild rice in Dongkeng Town were infected with rust, and the leaves withered and turned yellow. It was too late to spray pesticides manually. Wu Zhongmin, then director of the power supply station, proposed using line patrol drones to try plant protection spraying. Several young team members thought about it overnight and completed a week's worth of work in two days, saving this "rich field" in time. This attempt to "not do business properly" opened up a new way of thinking: only solving life's urgent problems is "covering the bottom line", and helping to build an industry is more long-term assistance.

Once the thinking changes, the extension of the service is reconstructed. The team members walked throughout the administrative villages of the town, marking the distribution of industries, the addresses of left-behind elderly people, and power lines one by one, and hand-drawn the first "Agricultural Situation Map of She Township." Since then, this map has been upgraded from paper hand-drawing to a dynamic digital map, and has become a "combat map" for the service team to implement precise policies: relying on it, the "Rural Captain" guards nearly 100,000 acres of farmland, and the "Shexiang Shanhua" live broadcast room has carried out more than 60 live broadcasts to assist farmers.

The live broadcast had a rocky start. In 2020, wild rice and yellow peaches rotted in the ground in Dajiu Village, Jingning County, and buyers could not get in. Zhou Lixia suggested trying live broadcasting. Her face turned red when she faced the camera for the first time. She had been busy for a long time and had almost no orders. She did not give up. She flipped through her mobile phone to learn how to call out orders, chased friends in the media to ask about conversation skills, and even went to Lishui for meetings with a notebook to find out how to do it. Later, she squatted in the field and broke off the wild rice to show the cross-section to the camera: "I picked it in the dark at three o'clock in the morning. You can see whether it is sweet or not." Sincerity is more effective than skill. 65 live broadcasts were run, and the total income of farmers increased by more than 10 million yuan.

From "one plant protection" to "one map" and then to "one brand", "Shexiang Shanhua" has completed the energy level transition from life services to industrial services. The "Shexiang "Agricultural" Situation Map" project won the silver medal in the Zhejiang Province New Era Civilization Practice Project Competition, and the micro-film "Rural Captain" won the SASAC Outstanding Brand Story Award - these confirm a judgment: the depth of serving the people ultimately depends on its accuracy in responding to real needs.

From a pair of scissors to a map, from an old table to a battlefield, from the basics of life to industrial empowerment, "Shexiang Mountain Flower" spent twenty years answering a question: services rooted in the soil will eventually bloom across mountains and seas.