Poor counties derive wide range of benefits from paired assistance programs

Paired assistance programs match wealthier eastern provinces with impoverished counties in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in China's far west.

The aim is to provide economic development, education, healthcare and other forms of assistance. The programs have long served as a way to advance unity and common prosperity.

One of the programs is in Jinnan New Village, which is situated amid the rolling Gobi Desert in Xinjiang's Qira county.

In 2014, the village was home to vast areas of wasteland on the southern edge of the Taklimakan Desert, before a team of officials from the village's namesake district in the port city of Tianjin arrived from more than 2,000 kilometers away.

They poured tens of millions of yuan into the area's poverty relief fund, and in just four years built from scratch a vegetable-growing village that is home to more than 400 greenhouses.

Since 2018, some 370 families from the Uygur ethnic group, mostly herders who roam pastures on the slopes of the Kunlun Mountains, have moved to the village.

They settled in free homes, provided by the local government, which have tap water and flush toilets.

The village also boasts a kindergarten and, just 2 kilometers away, an industrial park built with help from Tianjin is ready to offer employment to the herders-turned-workers. With aid mostly from ethnic Han technicians sent from Tianjin, the villagers learned to plant tomatoes, trim fig trees and grow cucumbers. Now, each greenhouse helps earn average revenue of 20,000 yuan ($2,806) annually.

Gulzulnur Turson, 23, is among those who relocated to the village. She and her 26-year-old sister, Ibadat Turson, were recently checking fig trees in one of three greenhouses leased to their family three years ago.

The family, which moved to the new village in 2018 from a secluded mountainous pasture, also grows chiles and tomatoes.