Ryan Pyle Blog: Taking Back the Golf Courses

Hello.

I wanted to direct you all to a new bit of work I've completed with writer Dan Washburn. The piece is about the government taking back land from illlegal golf courses. Interesting times in the development of China. Please take a look at Dan's article, wild stuff.

LINK: http://www.slate.com/id/2246914/pagenum/2

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The Forbidden Game
China's on-again, off-again war against golf.

By Dan Washburn

Posted Tuesday, March 9, 2010, at 10:04 AM ET

JIANSHAN VILLAGE, Zhejiang, China—Last November, when the Chinese government held a press conference to announce its most recent crackdown on illegal land use, it highlighted five investigations. Three involved heavy industry: a coking plant, a plastics factory, and a rare-earth metals mine. The other two were about golf courses, and they were the ones that made the headlines. "Golf defies rules to gain ground," screamed China Daily.

While the announcement raised a few eyebrows in China's golf industry, it was easy to brush it off as another toothless threat from Beijing. Almost all of the nation's 600 or so completed golf courses are illegal in some way. In order to operate as a golf business in China, you need to have an official license. Since 2004, however, there's been a moratorium on course construction in the country, making the acquisition of such a license impossible. Nevertheless, about 400 new golf facilities have opened their gates in the past six years.

The most generous estimates put the number of golfers in China at a few million—statistically zero percent of the population. While the game is growing in popularity, in many developers' eyes golf courses exist primarily as a means to sell the million-dollar homes that get built around them. On a recent trip to China, a representative of an American course design firm compared the goings-on here to the Oklahoma land run combined with the California gold rush. China, the nation that banned golf development, had somehow emerged as the only country in the world still in the midst of a golf boom.

That was before the government started digging up fairways. The bulldozers arrived at dawn in early December. There were more than a dozen lined up outside the gate of the Anji King Valley Country Club, 140 miles southwest of Shanghai. The convoy drove past the fountain, the bronze knight, and the Tudor-style clubhouse, and arrived at the multimillion-dollar 18-hole course that had been open for little more than a year and was scheduled to play host to a Ladies European Tour event this October. For 10 days, the excavators ripped up turf and snapped irrigation pipes in the soil below.

King Valley's punishment is the harshest thus far, but some in the industry believe government inspectors (the "Beijing golf police," as they have become known on the ground) could make their way throughout the country, one province at a time. Since the beginning of the year, the golf police have been frisking finished and unfinished golf courses throughout central China's Sichuan province, a hotbed of construction activity. Several projects there have been put on hold pending further review.

It makes sense that the "rich man's game" would get special scrutiny. While the Communists lifted their ban on the sport in 1984, golf still suffers an image problem in China, where a weekend round costs $160 on average. Critics have contended that such a high-consumption pastime runs counter to several of President Hu Jintao's primary concerns—among them, rural land rights and the widening gap between rich and poor. Farm land is a precious commodity in a country that must feed 21 percent of the world's population with less than 8 percent of its arable land. China has lost more than 30,000 square miles of agricultural land since 1996, and its current total of about 470,000 square miles is getting dangerously close to the 463,323-square-mile baseline the government believes necessary to sustain its massive population. As such, while golf-related construction accounted for a tiny fraction of the reported 42,000 cases of illegal land usage in China last year, it's good PR for the Communist government to say it's tackling such an elitist activity.

Ironically, it was the Chinese government's reluctance to embrace golf—or at least come up with a set of regulations intended to standardize its inevitable growth—that allowed things to get out of control. China doesn't even know how many golf courses exist within its borders. At the press conference in November, officials at the Ministry of Land and Resources said they were using satellite imagery to get a handle on the number. Back in 2004, when the moratorium was announced, state media reported that only 10 of China's then 176 known courses had received proper approvals from Beijing. One golf developer who wished to remain anonymous—this happens often when reporting on the legally nebulous word of golf construction in China—said the market remains "in chaos," with local governments continuing to approve golf projects despite not having the right to do so.

This was the case in Anji County, where King Valley Country Club is located. Anji had always been one of the poorer parts of Zhejiang province, with bamboo forests its lone claim to fame (some were featured in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The area's top government official was fond of telling people he had two dreams for Anji: a university and a golf course. Ask anyone in Jianshan village, where that second dream came to fruition, and they'll tell you that King Valley was a pet project of the local government, designed to attract well-heeled patrons from nearby cities like Hangzhou and Shanghai to the impoverished countryside.

There is some evidence that this effort was successful. While Jianshan remains tied to the past—locals still refer to their "production teams," a holdover term from the pre-reform days of China's communal farming system—a walk through the village reveals many signs of growth: small factories manufacturing decorative bamboo wall-coverings, kitschy hotels and restaurants geared at tourists, and construction sites for new housing complexes. All of this followed the 2005 arrival of King Valley.

The official reason for King Valley's bulldozing is simple: The course's builders didn't have the proper approvals to develop the entirety of their 400-acre plot. (Nearly 35 acres of the tract were farmland.) Dig a little deeper, and things don't look that straightforward. A dirt path along a fence offers views of the golf course's back nine, where most fairways now look like freshly plowed fields awaiting planting season. But a closer inspection reveals peculiarities. All of the greens and tee boxes remain untouched, the cuts around them following neat lines. The greens, and what remains of the fairways, are watered and mowed daily. The cart paths are still there. So are the buildings and the landscaping. Smaller shrubs are wrapped in white plastic to protect them from the winter cold. (Click here for a companion photo essay on King Valley's bulldozing.)

"Don't worry—the course is not going to become farmland," one of several workers who remain at King Valley said reassuringly during a visit in January. He said they were repairing the irrigation system and, since the greens were not destroyed, the course could be rebuilt very quickly. How could this be possible? "The local government has certain guanxi with our company," he said.

That guanxi, or favorable relationship, would seem to be strained these days. When Beijing's focus turned to King Valley, local officials ran for the hills. Many denied knowledge that a golf course existed inside the "Anji China Ecotourism and Fitness Center," as King Valley is officially known. (To get around the 2004 moratorium on course construction, "golf" never appears in planning documents for golf facilities in China.) Their case was flimsy: King Valley played host to a stop on China's domestic pro golf tour last summer; it's the official training center of the provincial golf team; and the large sign the local government installed beside the highway included the stylized silhouette of a man swinging a golf club. "Government officials go there all the time," said a village shopkeeper. "Only a ghost would believe their claims."

Despite the workers' assertions at the course, sources familiar with the situation say the company behind the project—Hangzhou-based real estate firm Handnice Group—is in no hurry to pay for the necessary repairs. Many in Jianshan believe the course destruction was a calculated move by local officials, a grand display intended to shield them from punishment from Beijing. Without assurances that the project is fully legal, the existence of a course like King Valley will always be dependent upon the word of local bureaucrats.

The Handnice Group is no innocent bystander here. The risks associated with opening a golf course in China, though seemingly minimal in recent years, are no secret. And while official land designations in rural areas often change on the whims of those in power, it was obvious villagers were farming on a portion of the land that is now a golf course. In fact, the company paid close to $1.2 million in fines for illegal land use between 2006 and 2008. But after each fine, sources say, the local government urged them to carry on with construction. The fines were viewed as a cost of doing business.

As is often the case with major development projects in China, hundreds of villagers were relocated to make room for King Valley. This is typically presented to farmers as a choice, but more than one Jianshan resident admitted their departure from the land was "kind of enforced." Reports suggest this process got messy. The most heated disputes arose over compensation—they usually do—and the noise surrounding a few key blowups may have gotten the project on the central government's short list for investigation.

Because the state owns all land in China, the developer pays the local government, which then distributes payouts to the villagers. Much of the money gets caught in the government filter—recent data suggests more than half of local government revenues come from land sales. One elderly man in Jianshan said the $15,000 settlement he received was not enough to cover the cost of his new home, and that the $200 he receives in "rent" each year from the golf course (where a round can cost $120) is "definitely not enough." He shrugged his shoulders and added, "But what can you do?"

It's unclear what's next for King Valley. When asked for a status update, a worker at the Anji land bureau said only "that's already been dealt with" before hanging up the phone. Another source said "a conclusion has been reached" but it has yet to be made public. Meanwhile, golf course construction in China continues to chug along. One industry veteran, who says his firm has survived "crackdowns" in the past, didn't sound too worried. The number of leads and new projects he discovers during his monthly trips to China remains "astronomical."

"I've been telling people if they shut down 50 percent, even 70 percent, of the projects there are still too many of them," he said. "A hell of a lot of golf courses are still going to be built."

Alice Liu contributed to this report.

Dan Washburn is a Shanghai-based writer. For more on the development of golf in China, visit his Par for China Web site.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2246914/

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Forced Evictions & Beatings

Hello.

This is an a story that happens entirely too often, but it doesn't always have a chance to make the news. Apparently, according to the New York Times, thugs were sent in to "remove by force" residents, many of which are artists, that were set to be evicted from their homes in northern Beijing. After getting beaten up they were all arrested in an attempt, the following day, to march in to central Beijing in protest. Once again, dignity is stamped on in the face of development. The full article is below, but first a bit of commentary.

In China, money talks. And it never matters which side of the money question you are on. For example, decades ago artists were lured out of the city center to the remote sections of northern Beijing to create "Artist Villages". These villages were the breeding grounds in the 1980s for many of China's most successful and influential artists as the rent was cheap and there was a lot of collective creativity and collaboration. But more importantly the artists were given long term leases (money talking), some up to 30 years, on their properties and some invested huge amounts to create their dream studios and galleries. To anyone that has been out there, and I have been several times to several of the more remote artist districts, the region has been transformed by the artists. Now, however, the money is talking again.

The Government loves to sell land; especially in the midst of insane property valuations. The Government owns the land, and apparently property rights, leases, contract rights and legal rights don't mean a damn thing. So if the government can offload a huge parcel of land to a property developer for a large sum of money, whether people are still living there or not, they'll do it in a heartbeat. Development, and revenue creation, at all costs.

So this artist village has been sold off to a big property developer who wants to raze the whole place and put up more non-desrcript high rise apartments. The problem is the land is inhabited. And instead of paying people compensation to move, the government and their developer buddies often like to use force and intimidation - and why not when you can get away with a media black out and no legal action against you. The problem is, and this is why the foreign media has an important role in China, is that this kind of heavy handed behavior is exactly what many of Beijing's elite officials don't want outsiders to see. They don't want people in the west, who are keen to invest in China, to see that China is still a country of thugs and money hungry developers that don't mind whacking a few skulls to move things along quickly.

In many parts of the country, even in Beijing and Shanghai, business rules are still defined by a system of "village rules". This country has a lot of problems that it doesn't seem to be ready to address; one specifically being that government officials have little or no respect for the rights of the people they are supposed to be working for, that being the average Chinese inhabitant; I wouldn't dare use a term like citizen, as that would imply a certain level of respect and rights. Government leaders need to remember that their sole role in life is not to great wealth for themselves. Holding a position in government is about serving the people, not beating them with pipes so you can get a big bonus from a property developer. China has 1.3 billion people, and they deserve a high level of service. Is that need being met? I'll leave it up to you to decide. But the corruption that exists in China at every level, and this case wreaks of property developer and local official collaboration, is a prime example of how impossible it is to draw the line between where big business stops and the government begins. And the little man will always get stomped out.

I worked on a story about this with TIME magazine back a few years ago where Bamboo farmers lost their land to a bunch of government officials who wanted to build a hotel and karaoke bar on their land. The same thing happened, no notice. No compensation. No settlement. Just sticks, pipes and beatings. The only difference was that the story I worked on was in a remote part of Jiangsu province. Today it is in Beijing. Scary times. Full story is below.

Time Magazine Story: China's Fighting Farmers

Copywrite: New York Times
LINK to Original Story: LINK
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February 24, 2010
Beijing Police Beat Artists Protesting Evictions

By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — Nearly two dozen artists protesting the forced demolition of their homes and studios marched through the ceremonial heart of the capital before the police intervened and prevented them from reaching Tiananmen Square, the artists said Tuesday.

The protesters said they decided to take to the streets on Monday hours after scores of masked men swinging iron rods swarmed over their community on the northern edge of the city, which has been resisting redevelopment.

Wu Yuren, 39, a photographer and installation artist who was among those who were attacked, said six artists were sent to the hospital with minor injuries. He said the attackers, about 100 men wearing white face masks, had been sent by developers who wanted to clear the area for a large-scale residential project.

“They didn’t say a single word,” Mr. Wu said. “They just started beating us.” The police, he added, did not arrive for an hour and then sat in their patrol car until the attackers fled.

Another of those beaten, Satoshi Iwama, said he received five stitches after a blow to the head.

Although protests against forced evictions have become increasingly common in China, the aggrieved rarely succeed in venting their complaints on Chang’an Avenue, the heavily policed artery that passes in front of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai, the residential compound of China’s top leaders.

Ai Weiwei, an artist and dissident who joined the demonstration, sent out a spate of Twitter messages detailing the march, which he said made it only about 500 yards before the police intervened.

“It was instinctive,” he said of the decision to protest. “We made a lot of noise, and I think we had a big impact.”

It is unclear whether the protest will force any action against the masked attackers or alter the course of development that threatens at least 10 clusters of studios where artists live and work on the fringes of the city. The clusters, called “artist villages,” house as many as 1,000 painters, sculptors and performance artists.

For two adjacent art districts that were the scene of the early morning protest, known as Zheng Yang and 008, it may be too late. In November, the developer cut off electricity and water, and most of the buildings have already been destroyed.

Xiao Ge, a curator who helped organize a roving performance last month to draw attention to the evictions, said the developers gave most tenants a week to move out.

Many artists are furious because they were lured to the villages with long-term leases — some for nearly 20 years — and encouraged to invest their life savings in renovations. Gao Qiang, a furniture designer who moved to Zheng Yang last August, said he spent almost $12,000 to fix up his studio after he was given a three-year lease. Although he is angry that he will lose most of his investment, he and other artists say they are most concerned about bullying from developers and, at best, the apathy from the authorities.

“It is not an issue of money, it is an issue of dignity,” said Mr. Gao, 38. He added that on Tuesday, the police told the artists that they would provide better security and try to reconnect severed utilities.

The police declined to comment.

The fight over the future of Beijing’s artist villages coincides with soaring real estate values and ugly scuffles over land expropriation, several of which have led to the suicides of those facing eviction. Widely publicized in the media, the suicides have helped prompt the government to consider modifying the nation’s urban redevelopment regulations.

Even if the proposed reforms, which would provide market-rate compensation for property owners and outlaw coercive evictions, are adopted, it is unlikely that they will help Beijing’s artists. Many artists live in officially designated rural areas, which are not covered by the measures.

Berenice Angremy, who has been a curator and art consultant in Beijing for the past eight years, said the repeated dislocations had been devastating to artists, both financially and psychologically.

“The government is trying to make Beijing a great cultural city, but without artists, it’s not going to happen,” she said.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: BBC.com Wine in China

Hello.

I've put together a few stories about Wine in China over the last few years and today the BBC ran a small series of the work. See below.

The Chinese can drink with the best of them, a fact to which western beer producers have known for decades. But apart from local "rice wines" and beer, a taste for fine wine is building slowly, and both customers and investors are answering the call. As the New York Times stated back in 2008, China could, within a decade, become the "next Chile"; a destination for affordable and quality wine production. As wages rise and more and more Chinese look to acquire the fixings of the the upper class and those associated with a luxurious lifestyle, they will consume finer wines, many of which could be home grown in the future. While much of the landscape of wine growing in China is government run through State Owned Enterprises, there has been an opening for foreign investors and joint ventures. The landscape is littered by privately owned and funded wineries; and among them one of the industry leaders is the Hong Kong based Grace Vineyards who run and operate a handful of vineyards in China; but whose largest operation is the one I visited in Shanxi province.

My production of this work was a truely remarkable experience. The grape vineyards in Shanxi were well maintained and well tended to, the harvasting season was exciting and full of rich visual moments. I think what's important about Grace Vineyards is that they've full embraced the local community, which was obviously a stated goal by the government when considering this type of foreign investment in the region. The Vineyard works with local farmers for maintaining and harvesting, the grape pickers, and women sorted grapes are all hired from nearby villages and towns. It's not only providing an income and training for those involved but it's laying the foundations for future generations of wine development in the region. I wonder what Italian red wine tasted like after only the fifth year in production? That's where much of China is today in production.

In Shanghai there is a real focus on consumption and education. And this is where foreign brands dominate, as schools and importers are setting up shop in an effort to educate the upper reaches of society on the wines of the world. Will China's wine drinking masses follow suit? That's anyone's guess. Is there room for the wine industry to grow? Absolutely, but much of the initial growth is because the industry has started from scratch. Sustainable development will only come in time. Many are watching to see if this industry takes shape to become a global player. Only time will tell. Ryan Pyle - Shanghai, China.

Click here for the BBC LINK.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Ba Ling Bridge

Hello.

I recently had the opportunity to visit a region of China that has often been overlooked during China's sprint towards modernity, and that region is the province of Guizhou. Guizhou is landlocked and mountainous, meaning it has missed out on China's industrial expansion, export manufacturing and farming innovations. The province is one of China's poorest and has been considered a lost hinterland for centuries. With that being said, the central government is now sprinkling money throughout many of China's rural backwaters in an effort to increase transportation links and re-connect this massive country; as well as help out areas of depressed growth. The Ba Ling River Bridge is one of the most visually telling examples of Beijing's efforts to "bridge the gap" between China's wealthier and poorer regions. The bridge is set to connect the capital city of Guizhou province, Guiyang, with the capital of Yunnan province, Kunming; one of the most mountainous and transport defunct regions of China as deep river gorges and mountain ranges are scattered along the route. I recently visited the bridge and was granted unprecedented access, but for only about an hour as the construction boss was on a long lunch. I even had time to climb the 40+ story suspension tower, which was a treat in high wind. Please follow the link below to view the work:

LINK: Click Here for Gallery

Summary:
The Ba Ling River Bridge, due to be completed in early 2010, is one of China's longest suspension bridges. Measuring 1.4 miles (2.25km) the project is a marvel of Chinese engineering that looks wholly out of place among rural Guizhou provinces farms and rice fields. The Ba Ling River Bridge, soaring a quarter of a mile (400m) above the Ba Ling River, is an example of large-scale infrastructure projects that are being built throughout China in an effort to modernize China's vast western hinterland.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: China's Western Gold Rush

Hello.

I had a gallery exhibition a few weeks back on Chinese Turkistan, or China's remote Western Xinjiang province. The area is dotted with oil, mineral reserves and some of the most beautiful natural beauty of any place I've ever been before.

Prior to the reception I gave a 30 minute lecture on the region and my work there. During that lecture someone in the audience asked me a great question: Why are Han Chinese migrants moving in such vast numbers to Xinjiang province and what kinds of work are they doing there?

The question was a good one and I responded with a few personal stories that I had come across: for example the man from Wenzhou who has lived in Korla for 10 years and started out selling refrigerators and is now a multi-millionaire selling drill bits to the oil companies. While that is an extreme example it is interesting to note that the trickle down effect of China opening up the province of Xinjiang is mostly benefiting the Chinese migrants who move west to set up shop. And migrants have been moving west for decades. Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times writes a great piece about the town of Shihezi, an almost entirely Han city. Andrew's story is below:

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LINK to Story: CLICK HERE
Copy Write: New York Times
August 7, 2009
Migrants to China’s West Bask in Prosperity

By ANDREW JACOBS
SHIHEZI, China — They marched through the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and countless small towns propelled by patriotic cheers and thumping drums. It was 1956, and Mao Zedong was calling on China’s youth to “open up the west,” the vast borderland known as Xinjiang that for centuries had defied subjugation.

After a monthlong journey by train and open-air truck, thousands arrived at this Gobi Desert army outpost to find that the factory jobs, hot baths and telephones in every house were nothing but empty promises to lure them to a faraway land.

“We lived in holes in the ground, and all we did night and day was hard labor,” recalled Han Zuxue, a sun-creased 72-year-old who was a teenager when he left his home in eastern Henan Province. “At first we cried every day but over time we forgot our sadness.”

More than five decades of toil later, men and women like Mr. Han have helped transform Shihezi into a tree-shaded, bustling oasis whose canned tomatoes, fiery grain alcohol and enormous cotton yields are famous throughout China.

This city of 650,000 is a showcase of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a uniquely Chinese conglomerate of farms and factories that were created by decommissioned Red Army soldiers at the end of the civil war.

“Put your weapons aside and pick up the tools of construction,” one popular slogan went. “Develop Xinjiang, defend the nation’s borders and protect social stability.”

With a total population of 2.6 million, 95 percent of it ethnic Han Chinese, Shihezi and a string of other settlements created by the military are stable strongholds in a region whose majority non-Han populace has often been unhappy under Beijing’s rule. Last month, that discontent showed itself during vicious ethnic rioting that claimed 197 lives in Urumqi, the regional capital, which is a two-hour drive away.

The government says that most of the dead were Han Chinese bludgeoned by mobs of Uighurs, Muslims of Turkish ancestry whose presence in Xinjiang has been steadily diluted by migration from China’s densely populated east.

“Ever since we arrived they’ve resented us and had no appreciation for how we’ve improved this place,” said He Zhenjie, 76, who has spent his adult life leveling sand dunes, planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. “But we’re here to stay. The Uighurs will never wrest Xinjiang away.”

Even if many Uighurs view the settlers as nothing more than Chinese colonists, many Chinese consider the bingtuan, meaning soldier corps, a major success. In one fell swoop Mao deployed 200,000 idle soldiers to help develop and occupy a resource-rich, politically strategic region bordering India, Mongolia and the Soviet Union, a onetime ally turned menace.

Shihezi and other bingtuan settlements quickly became self-sufficient, a relief to a government lacking resources, and its “reclamation warriors” worked without pay those first few years, steadily turning thousands of acres of inhospitable scrubland into some of the country’s most fertile terrain.

With an annual output of goods and services of $7 billion, the settlements run by the bingtuan include five cities, 180 farming communities and 1,000 companies. They also report directly to Beijing and run their own courts, colleges and newspapers.

“During peaceful times, they are a force for development, but if anything urgent happens, they will step out and maintain social stability and combat the separatists,” said Li Sheng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a former bingtuan member who writes about the region’s history.

In those early years, the ranks of the bingtuan were fortified by petty criminals, former prisoners of war, prostitutes and intellectuals, all sent west for “re-education.” During the mid-1950s, 40,000 young women were lured to Xinjiang with promises of the good life: they arrived to discover their main purpose was to relieve the loneliness of the male pioneers and cement the region’s Han presence through their progeny.

Demographics have always been a tactical element of the campaign to pacify the region. In 1949, when the Communists declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, there were just 300,000 Han Chinese in Xinjiang. Today, the number of Han has grown to 7.5 million, just over 40 percent of the region’s population. The percentage of Uighurs has fallen to 45 percent, or about 8.3 million.

Their grievances have multiplied even as Xinjiang has grown more prosperous, thanks in part to its huge reserves of natural gas, oil and minerals. Many Uighurs complain about the repression of their Islamic faith, official policies that marginalize their language and a lack of job opportunities, especially at government bureaus and inside the bingtuan.

During a recent visit to Shihezi, armed paramilitary policemen stopped every car and bus entering the city. But only Uighurs were made to step out of vehicles for identification checks and searches.

Neatly laid out on a grid, its sidewalks graced by apple trees and elms, the city is populated by the sturdy and defiantly proud who think of Xinjiang as China’s version of Manifest Destiny, the doctrine undergirding the westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century. But just beneath the self-satisfaction runs a deep vein of bitterness, especially among those who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s.

“I thought I was going to be a nurse, but I ended up sweeping the streets and cleaning toilets,” said Yue Caiying, who moved here in 1963, and, like many of those with an education, was forced to set aside personal ambition.

Lu Yiping, an author who spent five years interviewing women trucked into Xinjiang from Hunan Province, tells of girls lured with promises of Russian-language classes and textile-mill jobs. In an interview published online, he told the story of arriving women greeted by Wang Zhen, the famously hard-line general who helped tame the region. “Comrades, you must prepare to bury your bones in Xinjiang,” he quoted Mr. Wang as telling the women.

Still, for many early settlers, Xinjiang offered an escape from the deprivation that stalked many rural areas between 1959 and 1962, when Mao’s disastrous attempt to start up China’s industrialization led to famine that killed millions.

Early settlers like Ma Xianwu, who arrived here in 1951 and helped dig the first thatch-covered pits that served as shelter, offer a typical mix of conflicted emotions. He expressed wonder at the city he had helped create, but also sorrow over the hardship he and others had endured.

“People would lose ears and toes to frostbite,” said Mr. Ma, who is 94 and nearly toothless.

But any sense of bitterness has faded. “We were serving the motherland,” he said, waving off the adulation of a visitor. “The glory belongs to the party. I’m just one drop of water in the ocean.”
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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