Islamic world gives economic hope to China backwater
China's growing business ties with the Islamic world are opening new economic horizons for one of the poorest, remotest and most Muslim parts of China.
Sep 7, 2006 — By Alan Wheatley, China Economics Editor, Reuters

In Ningxia, an autonomous region in northwest China that is home to the Muslim Hui minority, young people are flocking to learn Arabic both for religious reasons and as a ticket to well-paid jobs in the booming seaboard provinces.

Ningxia University opened an Arabic department in 2003 and the language is even taught in some of the region's primary schools, according to Wu Jiangquan, 42, the imam of a mosque in the nondescript town of Lingwu.

Wu, who wears a white skull cap and prefers the Arabic greeting "Salaam Aleikum" instead of the Chinese "Ni Hao," estimated that 2,000 people are learning Arabic in Ningxia.

Wu himself is teaching 10 students. "It's the mother tongue of our religion but people are studying it because they feel they might have greater job opportunities," he said.

In Yiwu, a trading hub in southeastern Zhejiang province whose rock-bottom prices draw swarms of buyers from across the globe, 700 Arabic speakers from Ningxia work as interpreters and translators, according to Shu Guobin, director of Yiwu's Arabic Language Service Center. Another 300 work in Guangzhou.

He said interpreters earned 3,000 yuan a month, rising to 10,000 or above -- more than they could earn in a year back home.

"It is very helpful to promote our city's economic development and raise people's living standards," Shu, whose center was set up by the Ningxia city of Wuzhong, said of the demand for language skills.

Ningxia needs all the help it can get. Gross domestic product per head of its 5.7 million population in 2004 was 7,880 yuan ($990), just 56 percent of the national average, making it the eighth-poorest of China's 31 provinces.

RUNNING DRY

One of Ningxia's biggest problems is desertification. Away from the Yellow River, the land quickly turns to arid scrub.

Japan has sent teams to plant trees to help counter dust storms that every spring dump sand as far away as Tokyo.

About an hour's drive from Lingwu, Double-Well Village can no longer live up to its name. After three years of drought, one of the wells has run dry and the other provides just one large bucket of drinking water a day for the 26 families who remain.

Six have left, but peasant farmer Li Jiangshuang, sitting in his two-room, mud-walled home, says the 2,000 yuan in relocation money on offer is too little to start anew elsewhere.

"We are too poor to move," said Li. "The government gives us a little but it's not enough."

His extended family of seven scrapes by on under 5,000 yuan a year -- and that is middle-income for the village, Li said. The family has a television, a phone, a motorbike and not much else.

One of the paths out of such grinding poverty is less than 50 km away. Past the crumbling earthwork ruins of a section of the Great Wall is the Ningdong coal mining base, one of 13 national centers designated by Beijing in a drive to upgrade the industry.

Its mines, which produce 25 million tonnes of coal a year, are earmarked for a multi-billion-dollar project to turn coal into liquid fuels to help cut China's dependence on imported oil.

Petrochemical complexes and power stations already dot the blasted heath of a landscape, suddenly rearing up through the swirling dust. Many more plants -- and the roads, offices and hotels needed to service them -- are under construction.

SMALL TOWN, SMALL SPENDERS

Zhang Peng, director of economic forecasting at the Ningxia Information Center, says Ningdong is destined to become the main driver of the region's economy, whose 10.6 percent growth rate in the first half undershot the nationwide figure of 10.9 percent.

But Zhang says the Ningdong project could suffer in the short term from the government's clampdown on investment spending.

"GDP growth in the second half will slow down," said Zhang, whose center comes under the government's planning agency.

Retail sales in Ningxia rose 13.6 percent in the year to June, but low incomes are conspicuously holding back consumption.

In Yinchuan, the regional capital, flats sell for 2,000 yuan per squ meter, a quarter of the price in Beijing. Dinner for two at a good restaurant costs $6. Only a few stores sell foreign brands.

Still, Yu Yonggui, a local cab driver, says people today are much better off: "A few years ago people wouldn't even pay 1 kuai (yuan) for a taxi, but now they get in for 5 kuai no problem."

The aspirations evident in Yinchuan's "Gep" clothes store and "Chcedo" cosmetics salon, inspired by Gap and Shisedo, were on display at a recent halal food fair in the city.

So were Ningxia's shortcomings.

Exhibitors showed off mutton, dried beef and deer penises and spoke of their hopes of conquering markets in the Muslim world.

But Lan Liangliang, a businessman who sells light industrial goods to the Middle East, was not impressed by the quality of the products he saw. "This is meant to be an international exhibition, but it's just like a small market," he said."

($1=7.953 Yuan)