The Wonder Years.(Wei Ziqi)

Wei Ziqi's business career began with leeches. Other ideas had caught his eye, usually when he went to the city to see relatives. For a spell, he considered Amway, because a man on the street handed him a flyer, and he also thought about a direct-marketing company that sold phone cards. But the leeches impressed him most. At a cousin's house, he had seen a television program about successful rural entrepreneurs who raised leeches, which they sold to manufacturers of traditional Chinese medicine.

Wei Ziqi collected a stake of five hundred and fifty dollars, with contributions from two of his nephews. He built a shallow cement pool beside his house, and then he travelled to Tangxian County, the leech capital of northern China. It represented the farthest journey of his life: four hours by bus. He returned with two barrels, filled with leeches that were so small they looked like the squiggles of a calligrapher's brush. Every day, Wei Ziqi fed them the blood of chickens, sheep, and pigs. Within a week, the squiggles began to diminish. Maybe the water was too cold, or too deep; he never knew for certain. But soon the pool was empty, and that was the end of Wei Ziqi's career as a leech farmer.

He lived in Sancha, a village situated at the top of a dead-end dirt road about two hours' drive from Beijing. Sancha had never been large, and in recent decades it had become even smaller. Across China, rural settlements are losing people--an estimated hundred and fifty million have left the countryside to find jobs in the cities. In the seventies, Sancha's population had been more than three hundred; by 2001, the year Wei Ziqi tried the leech business, it was about a hundred and fifty. None of the villagers owned an automobile; only one person had a cell phone. The local school had been shut down in the early nineteen-nineties. There were no restaurants, no shops--not a single place to spend money. A few times a week, a peddler arrived in a flatbed truck loaded with food and simple household goods for sale. At harvest, other trucks appeared to buy the villagers' crops. All these vehicles parked in the dirt lot at the end of the road. That patch of earth represented the full range of Sancha commerce--it was a parking-lot economy.

For young people, the search for improvement usually led away from the village, and Wei Ziqi had left Sancha in 1987, at the age of eighteen. In Beijing, he found factory jobs: first he made electrical capacitors for televisions, then cardboard boxes. "You're always on the same place in the assembly line, and nothing changes," he told me. For a few years, he worked as a security guard, but opportunities for advancement were rare, especially since he had only an eighth-grade education.

Wei Ziqi's physical appearance was also a disadvantage. In the Chinese work world, looks matter greatly, and better listings often require a man to be at least five feet eight inches tall. Wei Ziqi stood under five and a half feet, and he was barrel-chested, with squat, powerful legs. His eyes were quick, but he had the dark complexion of a peasant. He looked as if he belonged in Sancha, and in 1996 he finally returned, tending a hundred walnut and chestnut trees. He lived with his parents, his wife, and their young son, and they cared for his oldest brother, who was mentally disabled. The six people lived on an income of less than a thousand dollars a year.

Nearly all Wei Ziqi's peers were gone. Of his eleven former school classmates, only three remained in the village. His able-bodied siblings--two older brothers, two older sisters--had all left. His path was unusual, but he refused to see it as a retreat; in his mind, the village still had a future. But it wasn't until the year after the leech failure that Sancha began to change.

In 2002, the county government gave the village enough money to pave the dirt road. Not long after the surface had hardened, Wei Ziqi posted the first advertisement ever made by a villager. He took a discarded tractor hood, painted it blue, and inscribed it with big characters in red: "An Outpost on the Great Wall."