TALENT SHOW: After receiving vocational training sponsored by the government, local farmers take part in a culinary competition in Yining County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on March 22 (HE ZHANJUN)

According to Li Yinzeng, an official with the Urumqi Economic and Technological Development Area, every year a class of 30-40 students from each university is trained for the company.

"There are about 300 assembly line workers at the Sany Northwest Industrial Park. Except some of the first workers who came from Hunan, the company's major manufacturing base, all remaining workers were recruited in Xinjiang from the Han, Hui and Tibetan ethnic groups. This has not only promoted employment in Xinjiang but also saved employment costs for the company," Li said.

Enterprising opportunities

Ablat Nazarbaki is from a village in Karakax County in southwest Xinjiang. In 1997, he left his hometown for the first time to move to Changle, a coastal city in southeast China's Fujian Province. In that year, he earned nearly 10,000 yuan ($1,639). In 1999, Ablat brought his two younger brothers to do business in Yongzhou, Hunan Province in central China, earning 12,000 yuan ($1,967) a year. Hearing that Ablat and his brothers made a lot of money in Hunan, many relatives and neighbors soon followed. By 2007, Ablat had hired about 1,000 people to sell food for him. Their monthly salary rose from 1,000 yuan ($164) to 2,000 yuan ($328).

In 2009, Ablat spent 4 million yuan ($655,600) reclaiming 33 hectares of wasteland in his hometown and planted walnut trees there. He has also built a 19-story building for commercial and residential use.

"The first and second floors are for shops, the third and fourth floors are for hotels, and the fifth floor and above are all apartments," Ablat said. "We plan to rent the shops and hotels or run them ourselves, and the apartments were all sold by the start of 2013."

Liu Zhongkang, Vice President of the Xinjiang Regional Academy of Social Sciences, thinks Ablat is acting as a broker for local migrant workers. "South Xinjiang is rich with fruit. After some people made money selling fruit in central and eastern cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou in Guangdong Province, they might encourage and help 50 or even 100 fellow villagers do the same," Liu said.

According to Ci Disheng, former Vice President of the Party School of the Xinjiang Regional Committee of the Communist Party of China, Xinjiang currently has a labor surplus of more than 2 million people. Various local governments are planning to provide language and other professional training for the local people who wish to make their fortunes in central and eastern regions of China. Migrant work promotes local economic development and raises incomes, Ci said.

"Particularly for people in south Xinjiang, it is possible to make more money working outside the region. Therefore, promoting migrant work has become an important strategy for all county-level governments in south Xinjiang," Liu said. He also called on local governments to adopt measures to help workers moving out of the region to avoid conflicts caused by cultural, religious and linguistic differences with the native people of their new regions of residence.

"In the future migrant work will not only be an effective way to boost income, but also to promote ethnic unity, facilitate communications between ethnic groups and ensure harmony," Liu said.

The author is a special correspondent from China Report

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