China is relocating more than half a million people from the arid highlands of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region to new homes close to the Yellow River, Xinhua reports for no particularly apparent reason now.
A stop along the old Silk Road in northwestern China hard on the border with Inner Mongolia, Ningxia has a large Muslim ethnic minority, the Hui, who account for a third of the population. But it is mountainous country with little fertile land, rainfall or natural resources. Growing wolfberries, which are used in traditional medicine as well as a food, is the main source of income, augmented by a little tourism. Ningxia grows two-fifths of China’s wolfberries, which flourish in the mineral rich silt of the Yellow River’s floodplain washed down from neighbouring Gansu province’s Loess plateau. Even so, Ningxia is poor, with the third smallest economy of any province.
More than 370,000 people have been relocated since 1983, and, Xinhua says, another 206,00 will moved over the next five years. Much like the plan to relocate 100,000 Tibetan nomads by 2010, the Ningxia program is said to be aimed at restoring the ecology of an area suffering from desertification. Same ecological point was made about the controversial Three Gorges location of 1.4 million people, too.
The other underlying message in the Xinhua report is that relocation lifts ethnic minorities out of poverty. That has echoes elsewhere, too.
2 Comments
May 7, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Chinese wolfberries actually grows quite well in North America, some entrepreneur may like to know. The fruits are bigger and taste better than the Chinese stuff. Any you can be sure that they are not dyed red.
May 7, 2008 at 7:40 pm
The wolfberry plant also grows in the U.K. It is known there as the Duke of Argyll’s Tea Tree as it was introduced by the 3rd Duke of Argyll in the 1730s. You can see the bright red fruit in hedgerows, especially along parts of the East Anglian coast. The berries are sold in the U.K. as food. Elsewhere in Europe, as in the U.S. there is controversy over marketing the berries’ health benefits.