Liuzhou remains the same Liuzhou, never stagnant.

The high-speed train passed through the tunnel and arrived at Liuzhou Station.

The buildings on both sides of the railway track are not particularly tall, but they are scattered. The white residential buildings are tall, interspersed with red brick walls of old houses, which are short. As the high-speed train gradually decelerated and stopped at the platform, Liuzhou had arrived.

Before getting off, the song in my earphones suddenly stopped. I suddenly remembered a scene from the movie "Mr. Red Carpet": a pig and a delivery robot meeting in a luxurious hotel, resembling two colliding eras.

Liuzhou is also like this.

From Heavy to Light

Before coming here, our group was familiar yet unfamiliar with Liuzhou. Familiar, because of Wuling, Baojun, and Dongfeng Liuzhou Automobile. Plus a bowl of Luosifen. Unfamiliar, because besides these professions, we didn't know what else Liuzhou had.

The five words "old industrial base" almost became the only impression before coming to Liuzhou. Of course, Liuzhou deserves this title.

That afternoon at the Liuzhou Industrial Museum, in just over an hour, it felt like walking through a hundred years of Liuzhou's history. This is a city with an early industrial start. During the Guixi warlords period, Liuzhou was used as a rear city to increase industrial layout, laying the foundation for later becoming an industrial city.

After experiencing destruction and reconstruction, by 1978, Liuzhou had basically established industries such as steel, machinery, power, chemicals, textiles, instrumentation, electronic communication equipment, general machinery, and agricultural machinery. In 1998, 20 years later, Liuzhou Wuling Automobile Co., Ltd. was established.

All industries were thriving, and it was also this year that Lao Yuan, from Guilin Yangshuo, decided to settle in Liuzhou.

Lao Yuan's family was poor when he was young, and he had to travel everywhere to earn money. Until 1998, when he was already 40 years old, he came to Liuzhou. At that time, in this prosperous industrial city, many businesses used honeycomb coal, and he could earn one or two hundred yuan a day by hauling coal, making it easy to support his family.

So, he decided to stay.

At that time, there were about 90 coal plants in the entire Liuzhou city, with nearly 30,000 people engaged in coal delivery. This shows the prosperity of industrial development. Along with the booming industry, the stone roads were uncovered and paved into cement roads.

Jia Xingjia, a writer from Harbin, once described the Northeast old industrial base in this way: workers watching the huge factories operate felt very at ease, "The factory is like a lover who has sworn eternal love, promising them a lifetime of care."

This sentence also applies to Liuzhou. At that time, people in Liuzhou had many job opportunities and good factory benefits, "lights and phones upstairs and downstairs," living a slow and comfortable life. After work, they would have a bowl of Luosifen and listen to a song by Liu Sanjie.

Young people at that time had their lives arranged by the factory. Every morning, they would ride their bicycles to work, greeting each other by ringing their bells, and everyone felt full of hope for life. The leisurely lifestyle of Liuzhou people is ingrained in their bones.

On the day after visiting the Liuhou Temple, I encountered an elderly man in the park. He and his wife had never left Liuzhou in their entire lives. One was a worker from a cotton mill, and the other was a worker from a chemical plant. They had no worries about life when they were young, and after retirement, they received a pension of more than 800 yuan per person, which was enough to live on. He said he was very nostalgic and wanted to spend his entire life in Liuzhou, taking a stroll and observing the changed lives of young people.

Liuzhou, where he has stayed. But time does not stop for Liuzhou.

When the native pig and the robot passed each other, the prosperous industry reached a crossroads of changing winds and clouds.

On one side, Li Bin and He Xiaopeng left the internet industry and founded their own car brands, while Musk stirred up the Chinese market with Tesla. On the other side, with the transformation of industrialization, Liuzhou also began to govern the urban environment. Some old factories, including Liutie and Liuzhou Huaxi Group, heavy industries, began to consider the possibility of leaving Liuzhou and moving to Nanning.

A familiar scene, a similar story had already occurred in the Northeast 20 years ago.

Have you seen "The Longest Season"? Just like Wang Xiang, who worked in the factory all his life, with the suspension of his train, the fireworks of the factory during the Spring Festival disappeared, and workers no longer needed to stay at the assembly line to repeat work. Many people lost their jobs, but with the advancement of technology, opportunities became more flexible.

At that time, Liuzhou, urged by the era to transform its industrialization, was also looking for answers to its transformation, just like the Northeast back then. The difference is that Liuzhou's transformation is in the era of intelligence, and technology provides many choices for everyone. But how to traverse the peaks and valleys of the times?

At that time, the Northeast had no answer, but Liuzhou must have an answer.

As a business card for Liuzhou's industry, Wuling is also thinking about how to answer the question posed by the times. After years of carefully building the industrial chain and having a large number of highly loyal employees, if they leave Liuzhou, will these employees travel together far away or stay in their hometown and find another way out?

Outside the window is the familiar cityscape, an attachment that is difficult to let go of after growing up locally. After much consideration, Wuling asked itself, "Why must we negate the past entirely, rather than seeking innovation in inheritance?"

This is also what Liuzhou asked itself.

The answer is, "From heavy to light."

Four Business Cards

The transformation from "heavy" to "light" is a long process. During the hundred years of heavy industry development, how Liuzhou, as a man of science and engineering, grasps this "light" is uncertain for many Liuzhou people.

Just like in "The Longest Season," Luo Meisu, Wang Xiang's wife, said to her son, "Our generation has been accustomed to being arranged. When we were young, there were many children in the family, we listened to our parents, and when we grew up, we listened to the collective. There was a circle around us, walking within it step by step, no one asked why, no one went out for a stroll, and even stepping over the line was scary."

The same is true for the Liuzhou people who are accustomed to life on the assembly line. However, the transformation no longer allows hesitation. If you say that the previous generation of Liuzhou people supported the era of heavy industry, the younger generation of Liuzhou people hopes to create a new Liuzhou.

How to create it? When there is no way to determine whether the answer is correct, the people of Liuzhou decided to step out of that "circle" first.

Although many high-speed trains connecting the southwest bypass Liuzhou and go to Nanning, Guilin, and Guiyang, Liuzhou's strategic transportation position has been weakened. However, Liuzhou still decided to start from its strengths and rebuild the city's appearance.

Liuzhou's strength is "water".

"Pot City" is Liuzhou's nickname. It is because when the Liujiang River flows through the urban area of Liuzhou, it forms a large "U" shape. The ancients described it as "three rivers converging, embracing the city like a pot," hence the name "Pot City." The Liujiang River plays an irreplaceable role in the development of Liuzhou.

In the past, there were no major roads from Guangxi to Guizhou, only two routes: one was a narrow and difficult ancient postal road, and the other was the Duliu River waterway. The Guizhou section of the Duliu River is called "Dujiang," and the Guangxi section is called "Liujiang." To enter Guizhou, one had to take the Duliu River. The first car in Guizhou was loaded onto a ship and sailed upstream from the direction of Liuzhou, lifted onto the shore at the Sandu Pier.

At that time, this waterway often staged the spectacle of "thousands of rafts competing to go down to Liuzhou." People at that time would sail on wooden rafts, starting from Rongjiang, flowing downstream, and coming to Liuzhou. Then they would carry the timber ashore one by one and load it onto trains for transportation to various parts of the country.

"I docked near the Liuzhou Iron Bridge. At that time, there were low houses on both sides of the shore." One rafting friend said that every time he went ashore, he would have a bowl of Luosifen and some cloud cakes in Liuzhou. Nowadays, Luosifen is still there, but the low houses have disappeared.

On both sides of the Liujiang River, low houses have been replaced by towering buildings, and the Liutie Bridge has spanned the Liujiang River for more than 80 years. This is the first cross-river bridge in Liuzhou and also the oldest bridge in Liuzhou. It was once a vital transportation route in and out of Liuzhou. After its completion, Liuzhou bid farewell to the history of relying on ferries and pontoon bridges to cross the river. "As soon as the train passes over the iron bridge, the anxious Liuzhou people know they are home."

Liuzhou was born, named, and flourished because of water. Therefore, combining the advantage of "water" with the strategy of "from heavy to light," Liuzhou wrote down four "ones" for this new business card: "a car, a flower, a river, and a bowl of noodles."

"A car" undoubtedly refers to Wuling Automobile, which shoulders the economic responsibility of Liuzhou. It is said that Liuzhou is a city "pulled by cars," and one out of every ten cars produced nationwide comes from Liuzhou.

Liuzhou decided that the new business card it wanted to create must be different from previous industrial cities. You could say that Liuzhou is greedy, not wanting to give up industry but also desiring green mountains and clear waters. Therefore, Wuling shoulders a heavy responsibility and cannot let Liuzhou's decade-long efforts to govern "acid rain" become futile. Wuling must work with Liuzhou to create the label of "the most beautiful industrial city."

Therefore, it became inevitable to promote electric vehicles.

Walking on the streets of Liuzhou, you can see colorful Baojun E-series or Wuling Hongguang Mini electric cars parked by the roadside at any time. These electric cars are called "baby buses." Because of their convenient parking and charging, more than half of the people in Liuzhou own a Wuling electric car. As Wuling becomes a necessity in the lives of Liuzhou people, Liuzhou has become the city with the highest penetration rate of new energy vehicles in China.

"A flower" refers to 300,000 Bauhinia blakeana trees. Bauhinia blakeana is the "city flower" of Liuzhou and also the new business card of the city.

It has to be said that industrial thinking is ingrained in the DNA of Liuzhou people, and they also use industrial thinking when cultivating Bauhinia blakeana. From March to April each year, 300,000 Bauhinia blakeana trees bloom together, creating a beautiful Liuzhou with "half the city being mountains and water, and the other half flowers."

However, this trip to Liuzhou was in June, and I was unable to witness the magnificent scene of "half the city being flowers" firsthand, but the "half the city being mountains and water" did catch my eye. Overlooking the hundred-mile Liujiang River from the top of Ma'an Mountain, the water is clear and the shores are green, with tall buildings lining both banks and bridges crisscrossing.

"A river" is well-deserved. The hosting of well-known events such as the World Championship of Water Motorsports, the F1 Motorboat World Championship, and inland sailing competitions has made Liuzhou a famous "capital of water sports and entertainment." Speaking of this, even if the industrial base changes, the leisurely lifestyle of Liuzhou people remains unchanged.

Caption: From Xinhua News Agency

"A bowl of noodles" is familiar. From "roadside stalls" to "industrial parks" and then to "becoming popular globally," Liuzhou Luosifen has successfully "stepped out of the circle."

Pictures of "waiting in line for two hours and slurping noodles for five minutes" have gone viral on WeChat Moments. Polite Liuzhou people will even ride an electric bike to take you to eat the most authentic Luosifen. As a fan of Luosifen in our Liuzhou trip team, Ms. Da only managed to have three meals in three days and still felt it wasn't enough.

Although she didn't get her fill, she can save it for the next time. At this point, Liuzhou's four new business cards have been assembled, and a "new Liuzhou" has come to life on paper.

Going Out and Coming In

Under the shaping of these four new business cards, Liuzhou's reputation as a网红城市 (internet-famous city) has spread far and wide. The familiar, hardworking, and passionate young man-like Liuzhou has begun to become "unfamiliar" to old Liuzhou people.

For old Liuzhou people, those stories that span eras are somewhat distant now. However, when the rain washes away the times, memories are not erased but instead integrated into the new era and the lives of new Liuzhou people.

As an old Liuzhou person, Li Wu often feels nostalgic. He missed the time when Liuzhou's industrialization was booming and didn't want to miss the "internet-famous city" version of Liuzhou.

When he was 30 years old, Li Wu left Liuzhou with nothing but a few bottles of Liufu liquor. In his era, liquor was the confidence to venture into the world. During his years of wandering outside, while toasting and exchanging cups, he thought about returning home with glory one day.

Now in his 50s, he sometimes regrets leaving for 20 years because the Liuzhou of those years can only be glimpsed from old photos in Li Wu's memory, which are both intimate and familiar.

There is a line of narration in "The Blossoming" that goes, In 1993, on Huanghe Road, a 755-meter-long street, there were over a hundred restaurants and hundreds of thousands of foreign wines poured into Shanghai's throat. This year, Li Wu left Liuzhou.

In the year before his departure, in 1992, the total industrial output value of Liuzhou City exceeded 10 billion yuan. Many industries stood tall on the land of Liuzhou, and the long wind began at the end of Qingping.

At that time, Liuzhou City was the largest industrial city in Guangxi, forming an industrial system led by automobiles, machinery, and steel, with multiple industries coexisting and a complete range of industrial categories. This is the old Liuzhou in Li Wu's eyes, with industry everywhere and thriving.

Li Wu's son, who has just graduated from university, has decided to venture into Guangzhou and follow the path of Li Wu's arrival. Li Wu did not oppose, but neither did he support it. He wanted his son to go out and experience, but he was afraid that he would miss the twenty years in Liuzhou like himself. Coming back is unfamiliar.

Li Wu's son said that his old father was worried about redundancy and would always come back to Liuzhou when he went out to see. He said he has an idol in Guangzhou, who was the He Xiaopeng who wrote on his social media before making cars, "Starting a business is a cycle of ups and downs, with ups and downs, and returning as a teenager.".

Young people from Liuzhou also want to embark on a journey of "returning is a youth". They all make electric cars, why not stay in Liuzhou? Here is Wuling.

Some people want to leave Liuzhou to take a look, while others want to come and see Liuzhou. Xiao Hu, who has been working at Wuling Motors for less than a year, comes from Yunnan. She heard the name Wuling and came to Liuzhou. In Xiao Hu's eyes, New Liuzhou is fresh and popular, Wuling is dynamic and trendy, and Luosifen smells bad and tastes delicious.

"In my eyes, Liuzhou is both the same and different from her. I was born and raised here, and I have experienced the process of Liuzhou's transformation from an industrial city to an internet famous city," said Li Wu's son. Xiaohu is a young person who came to Liuzhou to search for dreams, and he is a young person who went out from Liuzhou to search for dreams, no different.

There are many young people like Xiao Hu who have landed in Liuzhou. What pleased Li Wu was that more and more young people were willing to come and learn about Liuzhou, even if it was not the familiar Liuzhou in his distant memories.

The past and present of Liuzhou are like two completely different places. For the older generation of Liuzhou people and the new generation of Liuzhou people, they are not quite like the same city. However, what remains unchanged is that the people who work at 7 o'clock every morning, like the factory employees back then, are filled with hope every day.

Driving through the bridge, looking from afar at the tourists waiting for the green car to rumble past on the slope, I suddenly returned to Liuzhou back then. When the second double track super large bridge of Liuzhou hub is completed, the weathered Liujiang Iron Bridge will no longer have passenger trains running. The old story of Liuzhou is coming to an end.

However, as the train roars past and the laughter under the bridge blends into the river, one will find that the time has passed without any change. Liuzhou is still the same, never conservative, and has walked out of an irreplaceable "Liuzhou model".

In the final scene of "Mr. Red Carpet", middle-aged Andy Lau stands on the balance car that young people love to play with, trying his best to balance, much like Liuzhou in the collision of times.

Liuzhou people stepped out of the circle, bringing back a city with strong industrialization to the age of 20.