Small town, huge potential

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By Wang Cong (Global Times) 11:39, January 26, 2025

Locals are quick to point out that they have been holding basketball games after the harvest season for decades. But in 2022, clips of the competitive games and enthusiastic cheering were posed on social media and immediately drew widespread attention in China and overseas.

In total, the "Cun BA" has garnered more than 85 billion views online, according to official data. Since then, there have been basketball games every week and major activities have been organized every month, drawing basketball fans from across the country and even abroad.

In September 2024, a delegation of 80 US students and teachers visited the village and played basketball games with local villagers. Recently, a documentary about "Cun BA" - Game On: Hoops and Dreams in Rural China- has been released in more than 30 countries and regions, gaining millions of views.

This week, just days before the Spring Festival, Taipan held another tournament, under the theme of "Our Spring Festival, the World's Spring Festival," in a nod to the addition of the Spring Festival to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2024. The games and Spring Festival celebrations drew famous basketball players, musicians, and others from China and abroad, and were livestreamed by many media outlets online.

Vibrant development

Outside of the venue where all these took place, there were plenty of signs that "Cun BA" is no longer just entertainment for locals after the harvest season, but has become a new, vibrant model of economic development.

Inside a "Cun BA" theme store, T-shirts and local agricultural products like rice that carry the logo of the basketball tournament were on sale. Dozens of meters away, at a huge parking lot, a market has been set up for local farmers and businesses to sell their products, like markets in many places across China for holiday shopping ahead of the Spring Festival. On the streets, many restaurants offering sour beef soups, a beloved local cuisine, were filled with basketball teams and visitors. "The more visitors, the more businesses," the owner of a restaurant told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The games have brought in basketball fans and visitors from across the country. From January to November 2024, the number of visitors to Taijiang county, where Taipan is located, jumped by more than 32 percent year-on-year, and tourism revenue also surged by about 33 percent, according to information the county's publicity department sent to the Global Times on Tuesday. During the period, visitors spent on average 1160.05 yuan ($159.68) per person in the county.

Not just visitors, but some major businesses in China have also come to Taijiang to help boost local development. On Tuesday, as the basketball game was underway, a giant white airship was flying over the venue. During this year's tournament, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a leading aviation company in the country, dispatched its civil airship, the AS700 "Xiangyun," to the village to help promote low-altitude economy and tourism. The airship is AVIC's first self-developed civil airship with multiple technological breakthroughs and will mainly be used in tourism activities, aerial surveys, patrol services, and emergency communication.

As part of a national effort to assign state-owned enterprises to help less developed rural areas boost consumption ahead of the Spring Festival, AVIC has been helping the sales of products from various counties in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, where Taijiang is located. At the Spring Festival market in Taipan, AVIC brought 175 products from various regions. A sales promotion period before the Spring Festival has seen sales of 676 products from AVIC-supported regions totaling 12.28 million yuan as of Monday, the company told the Global Times on Tuesday.