BEIJING: Alim Molla, a 19-year-old Uygur man, likes to put on his headphones and listen to music when operating the warping reels at a textile factory in the county of Bachu, some 200 km east of Kashgar City in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Before starting his job, he trained at a vocational school for four months.
Alim has outlined a career path for himself: mastering the warping process in school, working in a textile factory for one or two years to build up some savings, acquiring car-repair skills and then working as a mechanic for the rest of his life. If not for the multiple factories in the county, he probably would have followed in his parents’ footsteps and become a farmer. But this land near the desert doesn’t pay off, no matter how one toils away every day.
For now, his primary objective is to become economically independent. About 3,500 yuan ($519) a month, the average income of a textile worker in Kashgar, earns Alim a comfortable life in his new urban setting. He currently lives inside the textile industrial park where his factory locates, at an annual rent of about 120 yuan ($18)—as the rent is largely subsidized by the factory and local government. Alim’s neighbor Adila Rahman’s family moved into the compound three years earlier, not as factory workers but as business owners. Adila’s father Rahman Yasin runs a restaurant where the main patrons are workers residing both in and outside the compound.
“They usually come to my restaurant for lunch around 1:30 p.m. Eight yuan ($1.2) buys them a bowl of noodles,” Rahman told Beijing Review. Noodles mixed with fried vegetables and mutton is a favorite dish among locals, over 90 percent of whom are of Uygur descent. Rahman had lived the traditional life of a farmer in a village nearby before 2019, but what he stood to gain from only 1.3 hectares of land was far from enough to feed his family of six. The family’s finances were further strained by the pressure to pay tuition for two daughters attending university in Urumqi, the regional capital. He moved into the factory’s compound in 2019, diving straight into the food and beverage business.
Rahman is content knowing his family can now set aside a little money and leads a more comfortable life, but his daughter Adila has bigger plans. She wants to equip herself with all the possible knowledge and skills she can assemble on campus and to achieve this goal, she hopes to travel to other provinces for further education.
After past bouts of violent separatism, Xinjiang has seen no terrorist incidents for nearly six years and today is earning back its reputation as one of China’s top tourist destinations and an economic hub under the Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by China in 2013 to enhance development cooperation and connectivity among participants. Many fresh graduates or Xinjiang natives working in other provinces for years have now opted to return to their homes in China’s westernmost region.
–The Daily Mail-Beijing Review news exchange item
