What a Narrow Alley in Hangzhou Taught Me About Prosperity

A Nigerian student walks through Xiaoying Lane and finds a different answer to a question his own country is still asking.

By Mohammad Toyeeb Abdulsalam
 
There were old women sitting around a wooden table when I walked in, not waiting, not idle, working, their hands moved through thread and shell with a quiet confidence that comes from years of doing something the same way, and they were laughing, not performing happiness for the visitors but actually laughing, in the middle of the afternoon, in a room that had been built specifically for them in a neighbourhood that had decided they mattered.

I had arrived at Xiaoying Lane in Hangzhou’s Shangcheng District expecting to take notes on governance but I left thinking about what it means for a place to actually care for its people, and what it costs a country when it doesn’t.

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Xiaoying Lane is not a showpiece, it is a working neighbourhood — narrow, old, the kind of place that in most cities would have been quietly demolished to make way for something taller. What makes it unusual is that it wasn’t, the buildings were renovated rather than replaced, the history was housed rather than discarded, the people who had always lived there were given the infrastructure to stay, rather than being pushed to the edges of a city that grew around them and moved on.
The visit was part of a social practice programme for international students at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, covering three sites within the lane: the Memorial Hall of the CPC Hangzhou Group, the Chairman Mao Inspection Memorial Hall, and the Xiaoying Lane Happiness Neighborhood Workshop. Together they told a story I was not expecting.

The Objects That Were Kept

The Memorial Hall of the CPC Hangzhou Group sits at No. 61 Xiaoying Lane and commemorates the founding of the first CPC local organisation in Zhejiang Province in September 1922. It was expanded in 2020 from 850 to 1,270 square metres and equipped with oil paintings, wax figures, 3D animations, and interactive exhibits.
None of that is what stayed with me, what stayed with me was a fountain pen.

Among the hall’s exhibits are personal objects donated by the descendants of the founding figures, a fountain pen, a hand grip, and a Zhongshan suit that belonged to Xu Meikun [徐梅坤] ; two personal seals belonging to Yu Shude [于树德]. These families kept these things for over a century and then gave them to the public, the hall displayed them carefully, where anyone could see them.

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There is a version of history that is only dates and decisions, and then there is the version that keeps the pen of the person who actually wrote with, the second version is harder to forget because it insists that the people who made history were people with handwriting, with habits, with objects their families thought worth saving, that insistence is a form of respect, and it is a form of wealth that doesn’t show up in any economic report.

A community that knows where it came from, whose story is told vividly and honestly and free of charge, is richer than one that demolished that knowledge to put up a car park, Xiaoying Lane understands this, many cities do not.

When a Leader Actually Showed Up

The Chairman Mao Inspection Memorial Hall at No. 56 Xiaoying Lane marks something that happened on January 5, 1958: Mao Zedong [毛泽东] made an unannounced visit to the neighbourhood, walked into residents’ homes, looked at their living conditions, and praised the community’s approach to public health. The hall preserves photographs of the visit, the cane chair he sat on, and testimonies from people who were there.

What the hall is really about is proximity, the act being commemorated is not a policy or a speech, it is a leader choosing to physically show up where ordinary people lived and take what he found there seriously enough to say so publicly. Over 200,000 people have visited since the memorial opened — a number that suggests the act still means something to people, decades later, in a way that official announcements rarely do.

Governance that gets close enough to see how people actually live is different from governance that manages people from a distance. Xiaoying Lane holds both memories side by side — the revolutionary founding of 1922 and the afternoon visit of 1958 — as if to say the two things belong together: where you came from, and whether you still show up.

4,000 Surveys and a Canteen That Has Worked for Ten Years

The Xiaoying Lane Happiness Neighborhood Workshop at No. 86 Pishi Lane was built from the shell of a former community bathhouse, It now holds a canteen, a children’s space, a health station, a lecture hall, a reading room, and a neighbourhood council where residents raise problems using a five-step democratic consultation process.

Before any of it was built, the community conducted more than 4,000 surveys through door-to-door visits and community forums, the questions were direct: do you want this renovation? What should change? How should it work? Residents helped design and supervise the entire process from construction through operation.

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The result is a space that doesn’t feel installed from above. It feels used, specific, and genuinely wanted, because it was shaped by the people who needed it. The canteen has been running for over ten years and offers preferential pricing for elderly residents living alone, that detail matters, it means someone asked the right question, not ‘what service can we provide?’ but ‘who is most at risk of going without?’

The women I saw laughing around the table that afternoon were not there because they had nowhere else to be, they were there because the neighbourhood built them a reason to come.

What It Looks Like When the Choice Goes the Other Way

I am from Nigeria, walking through Xiaoying Lane, I kept thinking about Lagos, Abuja, Kaduna and many others — cities I know, cities with deep histories and real community life, cities where old neighbourhoods are knocked down without record, where elderly people are cared for only if their families can manage it, where the relationship between government and the governed is often experienced as distance or extraction rather than service.

Nigeria is not poor in terms of what it has. It is, in many ways, a country that has not yet decided to preserve what it has — its histories, its communities, its oldest and most vulnerable people. What Xiaoying Lane showed me is that this is a choice, preservation is a choice, community infrastructure is a choice, democratic participation in the design of public services is a choice, none of these require a country to be wealthy, they require a country to have decided that ordinary people, living ordinary lives, deserve to be seen.

That conviction — if it took root in Nigerian governance — would change things in ways that GDP growth alone cannot, I say that not as a criticism but as a question I brought home with me: what would it cost us, really, to keep the things worth keeping?

Prosperity Is Not Only a Number

Xiaoying Lane is a small place, the alleys are narrow, the buildings are old, it doesn’t appear in lists of Hangzhou’s major tourist attractions, it is not trying to impress anyone,that is probably why it works. It is a neighbourhood that has been allowed to remain itself while being genuinely improved not replaced, not made unrecognisable, not sacrificed for development that benefits people who don’t live there. Its history is housed, its elderly are fed and engaged, its residents helped design the spaces they use, its story is told carefully and free of charge to anyone who wants to hear it.

This is what China calls common prosperity, at its most human it looks like a canteen that has run for ten years, it looks like a fountain pen in a glass case, donated by someone’s grandchild, it looks like old women laughing around a table on a Tuesday afternoon because the neighbourhood decided they were worth building a room for.
I went to Xiaoying Lane to take notes but I came back with a different idea of what prosperity is supposed to mean.
 
 
Mohammad Toyeeb Abdulsalam
A third-year Robotics Engineering student at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST) in Hangzhou, China.
This article is adapted from a course report submitted for the Explore China social practice programme.