| (Tianshannet) 2010-June-22 |
 
Xinjiang is indeed known for its beautiful women. The Fragrant Concubine, one of Qing-Dynasty Emperor Qianlong's (1736-1795) favorites, was from here. Her charm (a characteristic renowned to be common to the women from the west region of China) and her special and very pleasant natural fragrance proved a romantic dream for many men. Still today her tomb in Kashi attracts numerous visitors, both from China and abroad.
In the sixteenth century, Amannisa Khan, queen of the Yarkand Khanate kingdom, collated and preserved the Uygur musical legacy, the Twelve Muqam. She carried out the task with great intelligence and care. She has, therefore, become a symbol of beauty and wisdom, as well as a model for Uygur women to follow.
Today the women of Xinjiang, no matter if from city or rural area, or from the Uygur, Kazak, Tajik, Khalkhas or other ethnic groups, are all part of a regional scene of beauty and charm. Young girls here, though typically a little shy and reserved, will often greet people with innocent and friendly smiles. Women here are not only beautiful, hospitable and well-versed in song and dance; they also reflect traditional virtues of diligence, with respect for their seniors and care for their juniors.
Working and living in a land where there is less hustle and bustle, compared to the more urban areas of China, many women in Xinjiang, nevertheless, also work hard, persistently pursuing their own goals. They are most satisfied when those objectives are fulfilled.
Aziguli Rouzi, Deputy Director of the Women's Federation of Kashi Area, is a Uygur woman cadre with 22 years of work experience. And she still becomes very animated when talking about her work. She feels fortunate to be a cadre from an ethnic group. She said, "The country's preferential policies toward cultivating and selecting cadres from ethnic groups have provided us many opportunities." Working on women's affairs for so many years, she has witnessed improvements of Uygur women's social status. "In the past, a Uygur girl was supposed to get married at the age of 13 or 14. And Uygur women used to be of low status both at home and in society. Now, things are different. Women's status has greatly improved, and girls have the opportunity to go to the college," she added.
Bielihan, a Kazak woman from a stock-raising village in Daheyanzi Town, Jinghe County, is talented at ethnic Kazak embroidery. With the opening of her home village to tourists in the 1990s, she became the first person who put her own handicrafts on the tourist market. At the same time, she planted cotton and raised cattle and goats on the contracted land. Her diligent work paid off. Her family became the first household in the village that had an annual income surpassing 60,000 yuan.
Rena, a particularly beautiful young woman from Uygur, has been in Beijing for four years. A runner-up at 2001 CCTV Model Contest, she is now a contract model with a Beijing-based model company. As a well-known model, she frequents important fashion release meetings, and serves as spokesperson for many well-known fashion brands.
Aziguli Rouzi, Bielihan and Rena are just three of an increasing number of modern Xinjiang women who are fulfilling their ideals - and exhibiting great beauty. They have inherited national traditions, while learning and accepting new knowledge.
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BEIJING — When Ma Wenfeng was a boy, his father earned so little money growing wheat and corn that the family mainly ate mantou, a steamed bread that is a staple of the poor. The last thing he would have dreamed of was becoming a farmer.
Now it is his greatest ambition to start a farm, but not in China, a country where the very word for "farmer," nongmin, is synonymous with "peasant." Many Chinese farmers are long past retirement age but still tilling tiny, inefficient plots of land.
Motivated by the search for big expanses of land with abundant supplies of clean water, Chinese are looking far afield — to the United States, Chile, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Australia.
"We're the world's fastest-growing economy, with a huge demand for agricultural products," said Ma, who works as an analyst for a Beijing-based trade association, CnAgri. "When we look overseas, we see large tracts of land where you can operate a farm that makes sense economically."
From an economic standpoint, Chinese investment in farmland has impeccable logic. One oft-cited statistic is that China has 20% of the world's population and just 9% of its arable land.
"Throughout Chinese history, our land was never enough," said Tian Zhihong, a professor of international agriculture at China Agricultural University.
China suffers from chronic drought and desertification, and has compounded its problems in recent decades by polluting the land or paving it over in a headlong rush toward economic development. The Ministry of Land and Resources in December revealed the results of a five-year study (previously kept secret): 8 million acres of farmland, or roughly 2% of the country's arable land, is too polluted for farming.
From exploding watermelons to cadmium-tainted rice, both the result of excessive fertilization, domestic food scandals have made foreign-grown foods more popular in China.
"We want to bring American sunshine, land and water back to China," said Zhang Renwu, a businessman who owns two farms in Utah growing alfalfa to feed dairy cows.
Chinese companies are acquiring farmland where they can — many countries ban the sale of land to foreigners — or forming partnerships with farming enterprises overseas.
When China's largest pork producer, Shuanghui International Holdings, last year paid $4.7 billon for its U.S. counterpart, Smithfield Foods Inc., it also acquired more than 100,000 acres of farmland in Missouri, Texas and North Carolina. (Virginia-based Smithfield didn't disclose how much farmland was covered by the purchase, but just one subsidiary had reported it owned more than 100,000 acres in the three states.)
In Australia, a Chinese-led consortium acquired a sprawling 200,000-acre cotton plantation known as Cubbie Station, complete with what is said to be the largest irrigation system in the Southern Hemisphere.
Legend Holdings, the parent company of computer maker Lenovo Group, formed a subsidiary called Joyvio in 2012 to grow fruit abroad. Joyvio has invested in operations in Chile growing blueberries, kiwis and grapes and is scouting for new investments.
These investments are contentious both at home and abroad. The Chinese government is sensitive to criticism that it has allowed too much farmland to be paved over for apartments and shopping malls and that it has dragged its feet on long-overdue changes to modernize agribusiness.
Communist Party doctrine maintains that the country should provide itself with 95% of its own grain, and Mao Tse-tung preferred to let people starve in the 1960s rather than import food. Although President Xi Jinping has backed away somewhat from quotas for grain self-sufficiency, the underpinning ideology remains.
"The historic notion of food security and self-sufficiency is an incredible source of legitimacy for the Communist Party. This is, after all, a party of peasants that came to power during times of famine," said Jim Harkness, former president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
In a paper published in 2012, the Canada-based International Institute for Sustainable Development confirmed the existence of 54 Chinese projects overseas covering almost 12 million acres. (Land Matrix, an activist group that compiles information on the sale of farmland, found nearly double the amount of overseas land being farmed by the Chinese.)
China's farmland investments take many forms. Large state-owned enterprises are investing in plantations in Tanzania, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Zambia, among other countries, to grow corn, rice, cassava and sesame. Some products are sold locally and some are exported to China.
Smaller Chinese entrepreneurs have leased farms across the border in Russia as part of a deal with Moscow. Unlike in Africa, where the employees are local, Chinese have crossed the border into Russia as well. At least 30,000 Chinese farmers were reported to be working last year in Birobidzhan, the Siberian region carved out in the 1930s by Josef Stalin as a Jewish Autonomous Region, according to figures released during a trade fair last year in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang.
Liu Jianping, an entrepreneur from Heilongjiang, who is farming on 40,000 acres in the Russian Far East, said Russia has large tracts of arable land without enough farmers.
