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From where the sun sets
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Wu Yan
YUAN SHOUWANG is the deputy magistrate of the westernmost Chinese county of Wuqia in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, where CCTV shot the last view of the sun in China of the past millennium at the end of 2000.
“We want to get rid of poverty by improving our economy,” said Yuan, who was in town selling his county's handicrafts at the China Ethnic Commodities Trade Fair.
Yuan spoke of the county's aspiration to expand border trade with Kyrgyzstan, which is short of many commodities that abound in China and to develop border tourism. He indicated that Wuqia will make the most of the country's develop-the-west policy to acquire as much as assistance from the government and other areas in China as it can.
“Participation in this fair has really widened our outlook. We have seen many things we should learn from Shenzhen,” Yuan said. He cited a poorly packaged, but rare and expensive mushroom his county produces and said that his SZ experience inspired him to slice and package the mushroom more exquisitely to make it look fancy.
Yuan also publicized his county's preferential policy to those who would go to Wuqia to explore and process its underground resources such as gold, copper, lead-zinc and even oil. “We'll give comprehensive services and free use of land," Yuan said.
While he was displaying an exotic Kirgiz horsewhip to a customer, a Hong Kong businessman came up to him to talk about buying metal scrap the county imported from Kyrgyzstan. The fair, it seems, was serving as more than a simple trade fair — it helped raise awareness of China's western region.
Though it has a population density of just two persons per square kilometre, Wuqia is 20,000 sqkm in size, equivalent to six or seven counties put together in southern China. Inhabited by 12 ethnic groups, 75 per cent of which are Kirgiz people, the county is dry and impoverished.
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