Beyond the dialogue: Discovering Fuzhou's development story

Some journeys are remembered not because of how far we travel, but because they change the way we see a place. My visit to Fuzhou in East China's Jiangxi province was one such journey.

It revealed a city where ecological protection, cultural heritage, rural revitalization, and modern industry come together in a single development story.

The event that brought me there, The Dialogue between Youth Leaders from Jiangxi and International Friendship Partners at Different Levels 2026, ran from Sept 21 to 25 under the theme Energy of Youth for a Better World.

More than 100 young people from 25 countries and the Macao Special Administrative Region of China sat through panels on green development, trade cooperation, vocational education, and youth exchange.

The conversations were worthwhile, but the real education began once we left the conference hall and drove into Fuzhou, where the development story became visible.

In the youth dialogue, I expected conference rooms, handshakes, and sharing our views. What I did not expect was that the most meaningful part of the five-day program would happen outside the conference hall. Yet our journey into Fuzhou offered the clearest lesson: development is best understood firsthand.

Fuzhou sits in eastern Jiangxi, governing two urban districts, nine counties, and two development zones, and is home to about 3.5 million people across 18,800 square kilometers. It has been an administrative center for more than 1,900 years and is locally known as the "Land of Scholars and Culture". It combines mountains, forests, villages, historic neighborhoods, and emerging industries.

Fuzhou counts more than 30,000 ancient buildings, 17 nationally protected historical sites, 135 traditional villages, and eight national historical towns. One irrigation project even made UNESCO's World Heritage Irrigation Structures list in 2019. Walking through it, the density of preserved history is hard to overstate.

It's also a major grain producer, averaging 2.5 billion kilograms of commercial grain a year and earning the nickname "Breadbasket of Jiangxi". Several counties hold national titles for specialty products, from mandarin oranges to spotted chicken.

The city has built a "4+6+1" industrial framework around agriculture, aiming to turn these local goods into billion-yuan industries under the shared "Fuzhou Agro-products" brand.

Our delegation visited several sites, and each one revealed a different layer of the city.

The Zixi County Two Mountains Transformation Center, established in 2020 as a national ecological civilization pilot, showed one way the county turns ecological assets into tradable capital. It lets rural communities borrow against natural resources they would otherwise never monetize.

This approach illustrates how ecological resources can become economic value through appropriate mechanisms, investment, and financial services.

For me, this was more than an institutional visit. It raised a practical question that many developing economies face: how can forests, mountains, rivers, and rural resources generate livelihoods without being destroyed in the process?

That idea became clearer at Dajue Mountain, part of the wider Wuyi range and a national 5A scenic area. Located in central Zixi, the mountain covers about 204 sq km and rises to 1,647 meters. Its forest coverage reaches 97.43 percent.

With forests, streams, cliffs, and ancient villages, Dajue Mountain shows how ecological protection can shape both landscape and local identity. Standing amid such greenery, it was easy to understand why ecological protection is not simply an environmental slogan here. It has become part of the local economic and cultural identity.

Youth delegates from Zambia, Bulgaria, and Spain walked the same paths, comparing notes on how their own countries balance development with preservation. Nobody had a perfect answer, and that honesty felt more useful than any formal presentation.

Nearby, the Zixi County Lingzhi (Reishi Mushroom) Full Industry Chain Project showed what happens when that same ecological logic becomes industrialized. Backed by 1.3 billion yuan ($194 million) in investment and a plan to develop about 4,000 hectares of under-forest land, the project combines cultivation, research and processing, a cultural exhibit, and a forest study-tour program into a single supply chain, with a projected output value above 1.4 billion yuan. It links the ecological resource to a larger industry, turning a small mushroom into a sizable economy.

The idea is particularly interesting for countries such as Bangladesh, where rural areas possess enormous agricultural and ecological resources but often struggle to move from raw production to higher-value industries. For participants from Nepal, Cambodia, and Laos, this was not abstract policy. It was a possible model, and they watched how small-scale farmers connect to larger markets.

Then came another side of Fuzhou: Jiangxi Weijia Bamboo Culture Technology. The company focuses on bamboo and wood products, integrating cultivation, research and development, intelligent manufacturing, and online and offline sales. It promotes bamboo as a substitute for plastic and has developed a range of products.

This example shows another lesson from Fuzhou: traditional natural resources do not have to remain traditional industries. With technology, design, and branding, bamboo can enter modern manufacturing and international markets.

Our final stop was the Wenchangli Historical and Cultural Block in the heart of Fuzhou. The 650-year-old area contains preserved streets, lanes, and buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties. Walking through the old streets, I felt that development here was not simply about building something new; it was also about deciding what should be preserved.

This made the link between history and present-day urban life clear, as history had been turned into a living cultural and tourism resource rather than being separated from contemporary urban life.

This combination of mountains, villages, factories and historic streets made my Fuzhou experience meaningful. In one journey, I saw ecological conservation, rural vitalization, cultural preservation, tourism development and industrial upgrading working together as one development story.

For an international visitor, this is perhaps the most valuable lesson. Development is not only about GDP, buildings, or infrastructure. It is also about how a society uses what it already has — its mountains, forests, culture, skills, and traditions — to create new opportunities, as Fuzhou shows.

The Jiangxi youth dialogue reminded us that young people can become bridges between countries. Fuzhou showed me what those bridges can carry: ideas about green development, innovation, cultural preservation, and practical cooperation. When young people return home after seeing such examples firsthand, international exchange becomes more than a conversation. It becomes the beginning of new questions, new possibilities, and new cooperation.

The author, Mohammad Saiyedul Islam, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the School of Overseas Education (School of Foreign Languages), Sanming University in East China's Fujian province, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Belt and Road Research Centre, Daffodil International University, Bangladesh.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.