china
As the train pulled up to the station in Xin He, I marveled at the changes that a couple of years had wrought in Xin Jiang. It was the summer of 1999 and I had just graduated from High School. I was on a trip with my mother to Xin Jiang, the northwestern-est province in China, to visit friends and family. Since my trip to Xin Jiang in 1995, so much had changed and some areas were virtually unrecognizable. My family is not originally from Xin Jiang. My mother's family moved there from He Nan during the 1960's because it became increasingly difficult for them to make a living on their farm. Moving to Xin Jiang promised more opportunities and a better life. My grandfather was a skilled carpenter, and he managed to make a good living in Xin Jiang because it was still largely undeveloped, and skilled craftsmen were hard to come by. Since then, my mother's family has lived in Xin He, a small town in the southern area of Xin Jiang. My father also ended up there, but his story is much more interesting. My Grandfather was a high-ranking officer for the Nationalist army during the Chinese civil war. When the Communists were winning the war, he left my dad with his grandmother in Beijing, hoping to go and retrieve him during
In 1949 there were only four and a half million people in the entire province of Xin Jiang. The Urguys, Tadjiks, Kazakhs, Huis, and others lived in the region, and all spoke different languages. This prohibited discriminatory and oppressive acts against any ethnicity and that all minorities are free to use their own spoken and written languages. Another result of the PLA's presence in Xin Jiang is the hundreds of kilometers of windbreakers. The PLA has also helped immensely with the creation of the reservoirs and new irrigation canals that feed the farms in Xin Jiang. By this time there was bus service from Urumuchi to all areas of Xin Jiang. Only the commune farms or state farms had these. The herds were depleted, and there were no large-scale operations that allowed for a surplus to be sold to create revenue (Chen). It was still not developed and modernization had yet to come to that area of Xin Jiang. When they were there, this was unheard of. We stayed with family friends during our visit who lived on the outskirts of town. When he went, the roads were all dirt roads and some of the more developed roads were made of gravel. Land-poor of landless farmers were given an equal share of land and former landlords also got a share of land to support themselves. My father went to Xin Jiang in 1970.
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