Returning home for the hillbilly

I went back to a different world after 30 years

I visited my childhood home two weeks ago. It is in Zunyi, Guizhou Province in Southwest China.

I lived there till age 17, when I left for college in Beijing in 1989.

My parents retired in 1996 and moved back to the east coast where they came from. I haven’t been back since.

Many people, both in China and outside, have heard of the incredible transformation of Shenzhen from a fishing village of 30,000 in the early 80s to a high-tech mega-city of 18 million.

I first visited the city in 1993 and have witnessed its rise as I travel to Shenzhen a few times each year.

What is less well known is that Shenzhen’s transformation is hardly unique in China.

Over the last few decades, hundreds of Chinese cities and towns have gone through their own metamorphosis on similar scale, if less grandeur and dramatic.

Guizhou, also spelt as Kweichow in old times, is a mountainous landlocked province known historically as one of the most impoverished regions of the country.

For centuries, it is famous for “the sky never stays clear for three days, the ground never stays flat for three feet, and the people never have three coins” (天无三日晴，地无三分平，人无三两银).

The province is home to over 40 ethnic minorities which constitute 37% of its population of 38 million. Miao, Yi, Hui, and Thai are some of the main ethic groups.

Transportation was the biggest bottleneck for development as the province is covered with karst mountains, rivers, and valleys.

Guizhou is the only province in China without plains. Rice has to be planted on terraced paddies on hill slopes.

Local produce couldn’t be shipped out and even going to school took hours of traversing endless mountainous terrain.

As a result, Guizhou long suffered from backward economic and human capital development.

The closest US proximate to Guizhou is probably the Southern Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Alabama.

The hillbilly country.

Guizhou is defined by endless mountainous terrains like this

Zunyi, a prefecture of 6.6 million, used to be equally underdeveloped. It is famous for two things:

- Zunyi Conference, a seminal Communist Party politburo session in 1935 during the Long March, was held in the city. Chairman Mao’s leadership within the party and the military was established;

- Zunyi is the birthplace of Moutai, China’s national baijiu liquor famous for its 53% alcohol content. It has been served as the official drink for state occasions for many decades.

Its manufacturer – Kweichow Moutai – is the most valuable liquor and spirits company in the world by market cap.

Its value of $246 billion is almost twice the second ranked Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Today’s Guizhou has changed.

The government has implemented the century-old Chinese mantra – “to get rich, build road first” (要致富，先修路)

Highways and high-speed rail, typically built on elevated piers and abutments, crisscross the land, connected by the densest network of tunnels and bridges in China.

Guizhou has roughly 10,000 kilometers of expressways and rail lines today.

It is home to 49 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges, including 4 of the top 10.

The newly opened Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge towers 625 meters above the riverbed as the world champion in height.

It spans 1,420 meters, another world record.

Huajiang Bridge – the tallest and longest bridge in the world

Huajiang Bridge

In total, over 30,000 bridges were built in the last 3 decades, literally flattening the jagged mountainous landscape into a “plain of expressways.”

Some 2,200 highway and railway tunnels have been built across Guizhou.

On many highway and rail corridors, tunnels and bridges combined make up over 75% of the entire route’s length.

One such tunnel is the Tongzi Tunnel, sitting along the Chongqing-Guiyang Expressway.

Extending 10.5 kilometers, it stands as one of the longest dual triple-lane highway tunnels anywhere on the planet.

The longest such tunnel is also in China – the Tianshan Tunnel in Xinjiang that opened on December 26, 2025, which was Chairman Mao’s 132^nd birth anniversary.

The Tianshan Tunnel, connecting North and South Xinjiang, is 22.1 kilometers long.

It takes 17 minutes to drive from one end to the other at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour.

With improved infrastructure, Guizhou has gone through its own transformation.

Guiyang, the capital city, and Zunyi are dotted with high-rise apartment and office buildings, shopping malls, as well as endless rows of restaurants and hotels.

When I was living in Zunyi, the tallest building in town was the 4-story general department store. Now the tallest building – the Shimao Building – stands 50 floors at 187 meters.

Guiyang is even more vertical with over 1,000 buildings taller than 30 floors. The tallest is 406 meters.

When I left Zunyi for college, the urbanization level was 10%. Now it is 60%.

I don’t have old pictures of the two cities from back in the 80s. Taking a photo was a luxury and reserved for special occasions like graduations.

But I did take a few this time that show what Guiyang and Zunyi look like today.

Residential area in Guiyang, the capital city

Residential area in Zunyi

Zunyi Conference (1935) site – a Communist Party shrine today

One of the tens of thousands of similar elevated bridges supporting the 10,000 kilometer expressway and rail network

One of thousands of similar tunnels dug through the mountains in the transport network

Residential housing near my old home in the mountains

Street view - Zunyi

Residential housing near my old home in the mountains

Rice paddies in the countryside near my old home

While vastly improving the standard of living for the locals, the breakneck development also came with excesses, such as this weird private chateau in the center of Guiyang, shown in the pictures below.

It is called the “white house” and owned by the developer of the largest residential complex in Guiyang, which happens to be the largest such project in China (and probably the world).

Guiyang “white house”

“white house” at night

The residential complex, called Huaguoyuan, has 311 skyscrapers over 45 floors. 400,000 to 450,000 people live there.

The Guiyang “white house” has 13 floors and roughly 100,000 square meters in size. In comparison, the White House in Washington is about 5,000 square meters.

Trump needs more than one grand ball room to match his fellow property mogul in Guiyang.

The extravaganza cost $400 million.

Too bad the king of bad taste from New York and Palm Beach didn’t quite have a trophy more tacky than a property guy no one has ever heard of in a third-tier Chinese city.

Unlike Trump, Xiao Chunhong, the Guiyang developer, has the eminent good sense to convert the Baroque and Rococo-inspired monstrosity into an avant-garde art museum, after the distasteful opulence caused an uproar of popular disgust.

High-rise apartments in Huaguoyuan Complex, Guiyang

High-rise apartments in Huaguoyuan, Guiyang

Huaguoyuan at night

Huaguoyuan at night

Guiyang Twin Towers at Huaguoyuan

Guizhou’s property excess was not limited to such wasteful display of private wealth.

Numerous abandoned developments are scattered around, serving as physical reminders of the real estate bubble in the 2010s.

Unfinished residential construction in Guiyang

Unfinished office buildings, Guiyang

China truly dodged a bullet when Beijing pulled the plug to stop more capital from flowing into speculative real estate.

Instead, resources have been redirected into high-tech manufacturing, green energy, AI, electric vehicles, and robotics in the past decade, positioning China as one of the most competitive productive economies.

Guizhou has also pivoted its economy to data center, tourism, and aerospace industries.

For its next transformation, the local government is taking advantage of the coolest summer weather in China, plentiful supply of water and electricity, the lush green karst terrain, as well as the legacy aerospace and defense industries from the 1960s.

Tourism has boomed with millions coming to Guizhou for its cool weather, beautiful nature, and pristine waterways as well as its exotic ethnic minority communities.

The largest Miao village in Guizhou has turned into a major tourist draw

Qianghu Miao village at night – smoky from streetside barbecues

Miao village under morning sun

Bird’s eye view

Traditional Miao home

Village at dusk

Village night view

Stock photo of “China Sky Eye”, deep space hunter and the world’s largest aperture radio telescope 500 meters in diameter built in Pingtang, Guizhou

The hillbilly story

I myself am a product of the 1960s defense industrial legacy in Guizhou.

I didn’t live in Zunyi city but rather in the surrounding mountains. In that sense, I belong to the bluest blood of hillbillies.

Back in the late 1960s, China was in a military standoff with both the US and the USSR.

After the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s, Mao refused to submit to Soviet dictates and its encroachment of the Ussuri River boarder line.

By the late 1960s, armed conflicts broke out along China’s boarders with the USSR in both the northeast Heilongjiang province and the northwest Xinjiang.

The two countries went to the brink of a full-scale nuclear war by 1969 when the Soviet Union drew up a preemptive attack plan against Chinese nuclear arsenal.

Meanwhile, the US was deeply involved in the Vietnam war along China’s southern border.

The Chinese leadership feared that China’s industrial centers could be destroyed in wars with the USSR and the US.

The country’s primary industrial bases were highly vulnerable along the eastern coast (First Front) and near the northern border with the USSR (Second Front).

Chairman Mao ordered the creation of a massive backup industrial and military complex hidden deep in the mountainous interior of southwest and northwest China (the Third Front).

This was the famous Third Front Construction (三线建设).

In direct response to the 1969 clashes, Third Front Construction went into overdrive.

China funneled a staggering 40% of its entire national budget into building heavily fortified factories, railways, and nuclear facilities hidden inside caves and mountains in hinterland provinces including Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Guizhou.

Because of its deeply fractured, jagged mountain geography, Guizhou became one of the core operational hubs of the Third Front.

The state relocated over 400 coastal state-owned factories, tens of thousands of researchers, and millions of workers into these remote regions.

To hide them from Soviet or American airstrikes, the construction followed Mao’s strict military doctrine: “in mountains, scattered, and hidden”.

Factories were deliberately built inside deep karst caves, carved directly into limestone cliffs, or tucked away in dense valleys.

The “underground missile cities” in Iran today, which is serving them against US bombing with great effectiveness, are directly inspired by China’s Third Front.

This massive mid-century defense initiative laid the foundational infrastructure and rail networks that transformed the province.

The Third Front changed Guizhou from an isolated, agrarian region into a heavily fortified industrial powerhouse.

I was born into the Third Front.

My parents worked at the top-secret classified Base X61 near Zunyi, which was a sprawling aerospace and missile production network.

Its main products were tactical surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, radar systems, and precision military electronics.

The HQ-2 (or HongQi-2/”Red Flag 2”), a medium-range, high-altitude SAM, was made by our base.

HQ-2 was made famous by the even more famous Lockheed U-2 spy planes. 7 U-2 planes were shot down in history and 5 of them were over China by the HQ-2.

The first shooting down of the U-2 was over the USSR. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured and paraded on Soviet TV.

He was later freed in a spy swap with Soviet KGB spy Colonel Rudolf Abel. The story was dramatized in the Tom Hanks’ movie Bridge of Spies.

The five U-2 pilots shot down over China wasn’t so lucky.

HQ-2 was China’s first-generation SAM and served as the backbone of China’s air defense for over 4 decades.

Now they are replaced by the sophisticated HQ-9, HQ-19, and HQ-29 series.

Other similar bases in Guizhou included Base X81 in Kaili, which specialized in military electronics and communication equipment and Base X30 in Ansun, a fighter jet production site.

In some sites, entire assembly floors, engineering offices, and living quarters were constructed inside hollowed-out caves.

Dozens of cavernous complexes were carved to safely cache weapons, industrial machinery, and fuel supplies.

Since the early 2000s, Base X61 has moved to Guiyang and is now part of the China Aerospace Science and Industry group (CASIC).

In 1968, my dad relocated from Shenyang in Northeast China and my mom joined the Base out of college from the Beijing Aeronautics and Aerospace University.

Her college is known as Beihang University today and is famous for being the first of the “Seven Sons of National Defense” (国防七子) – seven top research universities affiliated with Chinese defense industry.

Beihang has been sanctioned by the US government since 2001 for its military ties, even before China joined WTO.

Clearly, the US hostility towards China has a much longer history than the first Trump administration. Beijing has always known who its foe is.

My dad never went to college but taught himself to become a senior engineer for precision machining.

My mom studied aircraft design in Russian, the default foreign language when she was in school.

She was involved in aerodynamics engineering for the HQ-2 missile and its later variants.

Living in the factory complexes in the mountains, our apartment never had a street address due to the classified nature of the base.

We had a P.O. Box number.

We never had a regular phone at the base either. Every call went through an encrypted exchange.

My parents each made around RMB42 a month in the 70s (equivalent to $20 back then). It stayed that way till mid 80s when salaries started to increase after the Reform and Opening Up.

By today’s standard, my childhood was defined by material scarcity. I never owned a bike.

But I didn’t even know we were poor since everyone else was equally destitute. We were far better off than the local villagers.

The odd childhood did foster a long-life fascination with military technology and subscriptions of defense tech journals like Aerospace Knowledge (航空知识), Weapons Knowledge (武器知识), and Ships & Boats (舰船知识).

They were to us, the children at the base, what comics are to today’s kids.

On the trip in late July, I went to see our old apartment, my parents’ workplace, and the school where my sister and I graduated from.

The base is now largely deserted since the operations moved away to urban tech parks in the early 2000s. Only a few retired old folks chose to stay.

Apartment buildings and factories are boarded up, sealed off, or abandoned outright. Nature has reclaimed much of the land.

My old home, on the ground floor in the middle, is now sealed off and boarded up

Office building where my mom worked on missile design in the 70s, now closed.

My old high school building

My dad’s workplace where precision machining was done. Abandoned now.

Disused classrooms where my mom taught English and math at the Base community college, as a part time instructor

The hill at the front door of our old home, seen from the back.

The abandoned apartment where one of my high school classmate lived. He is now a centimillionaire.

Road from home to my school where I used to walk 30 minutes a trip, 4 times a day. We went back home for lunch.

Homes of local villagers we used to buy our veggies from.

The site where the tallest building, a 4-story department store, sat back in the 80s in Zunyi

Where the locals hang out for drinks at night, along the river. There was no street lights in my time.

The village that has taken over the old Base X61.

One of the peculiarities of base life was the isolation from the local communities.

We didn’t have any real interactions with the locals, apart from buying fresh veggies and the occasional eggs and poultry.

From kindergarten to high school, we attended schooling reserved for children of base employees, where education resources were far better than local schools.

70% of my high school cohorts went on to college, at a time when provincial admission average was 2%.

In 1989, the total college enrollment in China was 300,000. Today, the number is 14 million.

I did well in Gaokao, the college entrance exam. I was admitted into Beijing Foreign Studies University with the 2^nd highest total score from Guizhou.

The university was founded by Premier Zhou Enlai and its famous alumni includes the current Foreign Minister, Mr. Wang Yi.

Rather than studying engineering and science like my parents, I chose to major in Development Economics and International Trade.

It was a time when the country embarked on market economy and globalization.

Some of my high school classmates have chosen to carry on the torch. My best friend enrolled in the Air Force Missile Academy and is now a Lieutenant General in the Rocket Force.

Most others have chosen to participate in the country’s economic takeoff.

My graduating class produced several multi-millionaires, including one or two centimillionaires.

I did fine for myself as the first class of MBA graduates in China, followed by a career in management consulting and ecommerce that took me around the world and provided financial independence by my mid 40s.

When I finished college in 1993 and joined the China Aero-technology Import and Export Corp (CATIC), my starting salary was RMB370, roughly $64 back then.

By the time I retired from full time work in 2018, I was paying over two million US dollars in annual income tax.

China’s economic boom has certainly lifted my boat.

Back in the 80s, we knew the country could boot-strap itself and we would do better.

I guess we have exceeded our own expectations.

Odd twist of fate

Today, several of Guizhou’s old defense bunker sites have been redeveloped into red tourism sites, underground wine cellars, or creative art parks.

But the legacy lives on.

Amid rising global decoupling and US tech war, Beijing has revived the core philosophy of the Third Front.

It is heavily investing in Guizhou as a highly secure, strategic tech hinterland—transforming the province into China’s Big Data hub and home to massive underground server farms.

The exact same geographical traits that made Guizhou perfect for hiding from Soviet bombs, i.e. its deeply hollowed karst topography and remote terrain, have made it the ultimate stronghold for China’s Big Data Valley.

Under Beijing’s national “East Data, West Computing” strategy, Guizhou has been engineered into a high-security tech fortress hosting over 50 mega-scale data centers.

Keeping hundreds of thousands of computer servers cool requires a massive amount of electricity.

By placing server racks deep inside natural or blasted limestone caverns, engineers exploit the earth’s naturally cold, constant subterranean temperatures.

This cuts cooling energy costs by more than 20% compared to traditional above-ground data facilities.

Just as Chairman Mao sought physical protection for ammunition in 1969, modern tech companies look to these vaults for digital sovereignty and disaster backup.

Tech giants like Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and major national banking networks store their most critical master data inside these bomb-proof, earthquake-resistant mountain vaults.

Even Apple keeps its Chinese customer data in Guizhou.

This transformation has been so powerful that the digital economy has driven massive local growth, contributing to over 45% of Guizhou’s entire regional GDP.

When we get older, you don’t know how far you have traveled unless you trace back to where you started.

Here is something I never expected in my wildest dream as a youngster – I now proudly claim that I am a digital hillbilly from Guizhou.