Location 5: Kokdala, Ili, Xinjiang, China 43°43'51.2"N 80°35'21.5"E.
And you can clearly see there are more green farms on the Chinese side. On Kazakhstan's side, there is nothing but barren lands.
And actually, these lands are just wasted land as their soils are too acid and there is limited water to grow any food. You can only count on the water from the melting glaciers in the surrounding mountains. For people in Kazakhstan, it is too expensive to grow and they don’t have a big market to sell their products. That’s why those Kazakhs in Kazakhstan decided not to cultivate on those lands.
On the Chinese side, all the barren lands are cultivated by the special division of the Chinese government: XPCC Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps - Wikipedia. This is a state enterprise with a military background. XPCC has amassed 2.6 million employees and farmers including Uyghurs and Hans and operate as a giant organisation. Therefore due to its scale, the cost of operation can be reduced and their market can be directly connected to the whole Chinese market.
Since the past three decades, XPCC has been sending its agriculture professionals to Israel every year to learn Israeli’s most advanced agriculture technology in a similar desert climate. Those Chinese students then returned to China and started cultivating those lands using the latest high technology such as drip irrigation etc. Once they found those technologies can actually mature into profits, they would sell some of the newly cultivated lands to local Uyghur, Han, and Kazakhs families or hire them directly in the cooperations.
Some of these Uyghurs, Kazakhs are sent to the reeducation camps and they are forced to learn Mandarin Chinese and the latest drip irrigation techniques to save water and reduce costs. Moreover, each village is assigned with one or more communist party members to guide them through to make sure that they don’t mess up the newly cultivated land.
Yes, the drip irrigation technique can significantly reduce water usage and cost. Thanks to the Israeli and domestic Chinese technology, they make the barren land in Xinjiang more and more fertile and productive.
So what are those people growing on the new land?
Tomatoes, chillies, melons, grapes, and cotton. All of them can sell higher prices than wheat.
Thanks to the strong sunlight and cold night in Xinjiang, those products are normally sweeter and tastier, so that they can sell really good prices in the whole market of China and the world. In China, people prefer to buy fruits from Xinjiang than the rest of China because of its great taste and quality.
Actually, agriculture efficiency is so high in Xinjiang that it produces much more than the Chinese market actually needs. Instead of relying on the “free market” causing the prices to drop and hurt those Uyghur farmers, XPCC, as a state enterprise, is pushing to sell those products to the rest of the world at higher prices or to more countries.
What if the rest of the country doesn’t want to buy the products?
The communist XPCC is relying on China’s “superpower” to force those customers from the rest of the world to buy using some terms and conditions that you can’t refuse. This strategy is learned from the USA agriculture business model. This is exactly what the US has been doing. And this is what “state capitalism” is about. Whenever Xi Jinping is visiting a country, he is also in charge of selling those products to the country by signing “free trade” agreement using carrots and “implicit sticks”.
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