Wu Renbao, ex-Party chief of China's richest village, has died of lung cancer. He was 85.[File photo]

Wu Renbao, ex-Party chief of China's richest village, has died of lung cancer. He was 85.

Wu died at his home in Huaxi Village in Jiangyin, in east China's Jiangsu Province yesterday afternoon.

With annual sales revenue of more than 50 billion yuan (US$7.93 million), Huaxi Village, which once featured in Time magazine, is known for its success in realizing common prosperity.

Famed as China's most eminent farmer, Wu worked hard over the past decades to lead his villagers in striving for common wealth.

As China's longest serving village head, in the early 1980s Wu bucked a trend and insisted on collective farming when farmland was parceled out to individual rural households nationwide. He bucked the trend again in the early 1990s by keeping rural factories collectively owned.

The efforts of Wu and the villagers turned once poverty-stricken Huaxi into a well-off village featuring villas, cars and a high per capita income. Villagers have been given gold bullion as gifts during the Chinese New Year in recent years.

The average annual income of villagers was about 85,000 yuan in 2010, compared to 32,000 yuan for Shanghai citizens.

Wu, who had served as deputy to the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, and as a delegate to the National Congress of the CPC, has been hailed as an outstanding example among the country's many rural Party members.

Wu made the cover of Time magazine in 2005. A feature film named for the former village Party chief that told his stories of developing Huaxi into the richest village in China was shown in cinemas last October.

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