Society
Guns to noodles - county's journey out of poverty
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-10-03 16:06
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XINING - Police in the remote, west China county of Hualong are trained in a specific skill -- to detect and deter "treasure" hunters, and to arrest them if they get what they want.
Hualong, an impoverished county with a predominantly Hui population, a Muslim ethnic group in China, has no valuable relics in its arid, barren land. The "treasure" is illegal home-made firearms.
Police have seized 700 firearms in Hualong's Qunke township since authorities launched an anti-gun crime campaign and set up a police station there in 2003.
Locals say many of their fathers' generation had worked in ammunition factories during the reign of the warlords, before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The factories were closed, but employees took home their skills. The trade prospered in the 1990s as strong demand pushed up gun prices on the black market.
The "Made in Hualong" brand is well-known in the criminal circle. A pistol can sell for around 20,000 yuan ($2,941) in coastal cities of affluent East China, about 20 times the cost of its manufacture, says Han Zhanying, a gun crime specialist with Hualong police bureau.
"Poverty is the root," Han says. "People here are too poor and the lure is simply too big."
He says the number of gun crimes is significantly down from 2006, but the trade will not die out.
Located at the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the county has 250,000 residents and about 37 percent of them lived under the state poverty line, or with an annual income less than 1,196 yuan, by the end of 2009.
But officials say a successful campaign to help impoverished farmers start up Muslim beef noodle restaurants could be the key to stopping gun-related crime and poverty.
Hualong has become China's major source of chefs making "la-mian" hand-stretched noodles -- popular in many Chinese cities. Han Shengjun, director of labor and employment in Hualong, says about 10,000 la-mian stalls and restaurants are run by Hualong chefs in 210 cities across the country. And the number is growing.
Han says about 67,000 Hualong people are in the la-mian business and they are expected to wire home a combined income of 300 million yuan by the end of this year.
"It's far better that Hualong migrants in big cities join the la-mian business than labor on construction sites," said Han. "You put money in your pocket after a day's work. There is no worry about delayed wages."
A villager surnamed Ma, who works in a la-mian restaurant in Xuchang, a Central China city, told Xinhua's Oriental Outlook magazine that he once made guns for a living.
"My family was so poor that we had to borrow to pay water rates, and even my aging parents labored hard to survive," said Ma.
Ma started his backyard assembly line in 2000. But before the first gun could be sold, he was arrested by police and sentenced to five years in jail for manufacturing firearms.
The local government hopes the la-mian business can give poor young men like Ma an easier, lawful way to make money.
Han, the labor official, says the government began to train jobless locals as la-mian chefs in 2007. In just three months, the trainees can learn the magic of hand stretching and a recipe for tasty noodle soups.
Loans are also given to families wanting to run la-mian stalls in big cities. Liaison offices have been set up across the country to help migrants adapt to their new environment -- from getting a business license to sending their kids to good schools.
Ma Helu, who runs a 70-square-meter la-mian stall in East China's Nanjing city, says life is good as the family of four can earn 70,000 yuan a year after paying rent and daily expenses.
The government of Nanjing aims to raise the annual per capita income of residents to 35,000 yuan by 2012, a target that looks out of reach for Hualong officials.
China's leadership has pledged to take the whole country into an all-round "xiaokang society" -- loosely an equivalent to a "basically well-off society" -- by 2020, though some 36 million people in the nation's underdeveloped regions, mostly in the west, are still struggling below the poverty line.
Whether the west can catch up with the east is instrumental to the success of meeting the central government's ambitious goal.
China launched a new round of West Development initiatives in the summer. Premier Wen Jiabao said the government would prioritize relief and development in a stretch of poverty-stricken areas, mostly in the west and dominated by ethnic groups, including the southern area of the predominantly Uygur-populated Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
Wu Shimin, Vice Minister of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, said extremely poor people in remote ethnic areas needed specific support packages.
In Hualong, the la-mian business appears to be the recipe to wealth, officials say, and the gun problem serves as the barometer to measure the success of the la-mian drive.
Hualong police officer Zhao Xiao'an says police arrested 65 gun seekers in 2006 alone. That figure has dropped to six so far this year.
But gun crimes spiked this year. Some locals say it is connected with the bankruptcy of a number of la-mian stalls following a series of factory closures in the wake of 2008-2009 economic crisis.
Han, the police official, says the cause of the spike in gun crimes is "very complicated".
The local government has been done much re-thinking and is about to try measures to reverse the trend, he says.
