BEIJING: When Chen Cheng, a government official in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwest China, was appointed head of a village deep in the Taklimakan Desert, he had to take extra precautions for safety.
Baxlaqbinam, a struggling village in Pishan County in south Xinjiang, had seen some of its residents become radicalized. When Chen arrived there in the first half of 2017, during his visits to the villagers at their homes, he would go in a group with other officials as there had been cases where officials had been treated with hostility.
In 2017, there were 255 households in Baxlaqbinam. As one villager said, “Many of my neighbors didn’t have a decent house or electricity.” Many villagers had only temporary jobs, which fetched them a meager daily income only as long as the work lasted.
Pishan was like the proverbial person in distress caught between a rock and a hard place. Bound by the desert on one side and the Karakoram Mountain Range on the other, it struggled to feed its population of 300,000 as its arable land accounts for only about 0.1 percent of the entire area. Severe desertification made it impossible for the villagers to live off the land.
Since 2014, experienced officials began to be sent to the cluster of 169 villages in the county to improve their economic situation since poverty was a major factor spawning terrorism. Chen found poverty blocked access to education and made villagers vulnerable to the influence of radicalism.
More than 95 percent of the villagers are Uygurs, the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang. They knew little about what was happening outside their village.
One feasible solution was to provide education for the children and teach them Mandarin, the standard language of China, to help them communicate with people from other parts of the country and be informed.
Another solution was to create jobs by developing industries. In recent years, with Chen’s efforts, two factories have come to the village. One of them makes sofas.
The owner of the sofa factory, Xiong Tingqiang, came from Beijing. Earlier, he was growing dates in Pishan, and then he found that the traditional lifestyle promised a business opportunity. The villagers mostly sat on the floor or on their adobe bed, and Xiong realized sofas would have a good market if they were made locally and were affordable.
He started the business with Chen’s help. The factory provides jobs for 30 people and its sofas are sold in nearby towns.
Bumaryam Pazil is one of the factory hands. The 43-year-old makes slipcovers for the sofas, earning 1,500 yuan ($225) a month. Besides the income, the factory is some 200 meters away from home, which she finds most convenient.
“My husband has his job and I have mine. Everything is going pretty well now,” she said.
However, things were far from well four years ago, when she got married. Her husband Kudrat Ismayil used to sell timber. Though once well off, he ran into heavy debts when his first wife had breast cancer and his son from that marriage was diagnosed with leukemia.
Kudrat said he was always wary when he ventured out, worrying that he would run into his debtors. “I had no money to pay them back,” he told Beijing Review. When Chen came to know of Kudrat’s plight, he helped him find doctors. The villagers’ committee also helped Kudrat and later Bumaryam to find seasonal work in other villages during the cotton-picking season and gradually, they were able to pay off their debts.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
