When Xixinan village in China's Anhui province went viral in 2023, its fairy-tale greenery attracting millions of views on Chinese social media, it faced a dilemma familiar to many rural destinations: how to generate revenue without charging an entrance fee, and how to share the benefits with neighboring villages rather than compete with them. The answer, as documented in the latest episode of People's Daily's video series Decoding Rural China's Governance, lies in a six-village tourism cluster that is turning online attention into a shared engine of rural development.
The episode, titled One Green Haven, Six Linked Villages, explores how Xixinan and five nearby villages have joined forces to create a complementary tourism network. Visitors can enjoy bamboo raft rides, a sightseeing train, homestays, and nighttime fish-lantern tours. By connecting these attractions into a single travel route, the network encourages tourists to stay longer and spend more, allowing more local businesses to benefit from the growing traffic. Rather than competing for visitors, the villages have embraced a cluster development approach, developing distinctive businesses and sharing opportunities.
Central to this cooperation is a revenue-sharing model that distributes income across the cluster. Seventy percent of revenue goes to the village where a business operates, 20 percent is distributed according to the original equity ratio—Xixinan village 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 ensures that all villages benefit from shared tourism resources while still having an incentive to develop their own unique offerings. The result is a rising tide that lifts all boats: 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 significance of this model extends beyond one town in Anhui. As rural communities across China seek to capitalize on tourism and online visibility, the six-village cluster offers a replicable framework for equitable development. It demonstrates that viral fame need not lead to unequal gains or cutthroat competition; instead, with thoughtful governance and a shared-interest mechanism, it can foster broader prosperity. The story was disseminated via Media OutReach Newswire, highlighting the global interest in China's rural governance experiments.
By linking natural scenery, connected tourism routes, and a revenue-sharing model, the six villages have transformed fleeting internet attention into sustainable rural development. Their experience provides a glimpse of how rural communities can work together to ensure that the benefits of tourism are shared across a region, rather than concentrated in a single lucky village. As other rural areas grapple with similar challenges, the six-village model may well become a template for turning viral moments into lasting shared prosperity.
