China News Service, Yinchuan, September 30 (Reporter Gong Hongyu) At the eastern foot of Helan Mountain and on the west bank of the Yellow River, a small town named after the abbreviations of Fujian and Ningxia provinces - Minning Town is located here. "Fujian" means Fujian and "Ning" means Ningxia. Behind these two words, there is condensed a cooperative friendship that spans mountains and seas for thirty years.
In 1996, the Party Central Committee made strategic arrangements for poverty alleviation cooperation between the east and the west, and determined that Fujian would assist Ningxia. Since then, the two places have worked hand in hand and worked together in both directions. In the past thirty years, this place has transformed from a Gobi desert with "no birds in the sky, no grass growing on the ground, and stones flying in the wind" to a modern "golden beach" with rolling vineyards and roaring machines in the industrial park. It has become a vivid epitome of cooperation between the east and the west of China.
Fujian businessmen invest in business and activate industrial development engine
"We work in the radish garden and can earn more than 100 yuan a day, which solves the employment problem and makes our income much higher than before."
Entering the Horticulture Village of Minning Town, villagers are harvesting, sorting and boxing white radish under the leadership of Li Kehai, the founder of Xinronghai Agriculture. Li Kehai and his wife Xu Lina are Fujianese who came to Ningxia to take advantage of the cooperation opportunity between Minning and Ningxia to take root and start a business. In the past eight years, spanning more than 2,000 kilometers, they relied on contiguous cultivated land to build a whole industry chain project for cold and cool vegetables in northwest China, and their business has grown bigger and bigger.
Thanks to the advantages of sufficient sunlight, large temperature difference between day and night, and few pests and diseases, the organic radish produced in Minning has a sweet taste and is very popular in the first-tier city markets.
Over the years, more and more Fujian businessmen have come to Minning Town from Fujian to invest and start businesses. Liu Zuoxin, secretary of the Party branch of Funing Community in Minning Town, told China News Network that currently about 70% of the companies in the town are Fujian companies. Fujian enterprises such as Hongxing Erke and Xiamen Jianfa Group continue to expand their local industrial footprint and contribute to Minning Town's economic growth and employment for the masses.
Business investment has financial needs. Industrial Bank, which started in Fujian, actively responded to the call for Minning cooperation and proactively built a financial bridge to serve Minning cooperation. Wang Chunmei, president of the small and micro branch in Minning Town, told China News Network that in order to better support the industrial development of Minning Town, Industrial Bank has specially provided special assistance funds for Minning cooperation to subsidize individual customers in Minning Town. In addition, a fee-free policy is implemented for merchant collection codes in Minning Town to reduce the operating costs of small and micro merchants.
In the early stages of Xinronghai's development, it also ran into a shortage of funds due to investment in land improvement and other investments. Industrial Bank not only provided millions of yuan in credit loans to enterprises, but also actively helped enterprises connect with agricultural experts from Fujian. Using a symbiotic model of "finance + technology + industry", it helped Xinronghai solve the problem of biological pest control and further assisted the development of the enterprise.
Today, Xinronghai has hired more than 200 local villagers to work, and the sorting, planting, and cold storage positions are stably employed throughout the year, allowing the villagers to secure their jobs.
"Now almost every household in Funing community has a car, the buildings are connected, and transportation is convenient. Such a life was unimaginable before." Liu Zuoxin, who has personally witnessed the changes in Minning Town over the past thirty years, said with emotion.
Data show that in 2025, the per capita disposable income of rural residents in Minning Town will reach 20,292 yuan, an increase of about 40 times from the 500 yuan at the beginning of the relocation in 1997. Looking at Minning Industrial Park, 53 companies have been registered and 33 entities have settled in. The investment in fixed assets has exceeded 780 million yuan, and the total output value has exceeded 1 billion yuan.
3D printing equipment at Ningxia University of Technology. Photo by Gong Hongyu
Educational cooperation deepens "blood transfusion" assistance and moves toward "hematogenesis" win-win situation
If industry is the backbone of Minning collaboration, education represents the bloodline of Minning collaboration’s in-depth integration. In Shizuishan City, Ningxia, a modern campus built jointly by Fujian and Ningxia provinces rose from the ground.
In recent years, Shizuishan has accelerated its transformation as a resource-based city, and the demand for applied talents has exploded. However, there are only a handful of local applied undergraduate universities. In this context, Ningxia Institute of Technology came into being.
In September this year, the college began its first batch of enrollment, offering five majors including energy and chemical engineering, data science and big data technology, to accurately meet the needs of key industries such as Ningxia's energy, chemical industry, and digital economy. Zhou Zhong, executive president of Ningxia University of Technology, told a reporter from China News Service that in order to support the construction of the college, Industrial Bank has invested 230 million yuan in fixed asset loans, and based on actual needs such as enrollment scale, tuition income, equipment procurement, and teacher introduction, it has studied supporting financial service plans and provided support from project construction to school operation.
Under the promotion of Minning Cooperation, in order to strengthen talent training, the school signed cooperative education agreements with more than 10 Fujian enterprises, including TPV Technology and Fujian OPC Alliance Units, to implement the "3+1" model - students study in Ningxia for the first three years and go to Fujian Industrial Park for innovation and entrepreneurship practice and corporate internship in the last year.
The introduction of high-quality educational resources and social capital from the east has allowed the two provinces to collaborate to achieve a comprehensive transformation from "short-term assistance and one-way support" to "systematic, sustainable endogenous development", from people's livelihood assistance to industrial empowerment, and from "blood transfusion assistance" to "hematopoietic development".
Looking to the future, with the formation of a virtuous cycle of "education agglomeration-population introduction-industrial upgrading", the deep integration of Fujian's capital and technology with Ningxia's resources, land and manpower will continue to inject vitality into the joint education of talents, the integration of science and education, and the common prosperity of industries in the two provinces.
In the past thirty years, the connection between mountains and sea has never been so close. From the factories invested by Fujian businessmen to the classrooms donated for education, from the "dry beach" to the "golden beach", Minning Cooperation used industry as the pen and education as the ink to draw a picture of the era of cooperation between the East and the West on the land of Ningxia, and also wrote the answer to the common prosperity of "Minning as a family". (over)
