How Fujian and Ningxia build a shared future

Buildings can be constructed quickly; institutions and skills take much longer to develop. Over the past 30 years, Fujian has sent more than 7,000 professional technicians in education, healthcare, and other fields to Ningxia. Schools and hospitals in the two regions have established twinning relationships, creating channels for long-term knowledge exchange.

Healthcare provides a concrete example. The First Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University has sent medical professionals to the People's Hospital of Yuanzhou District in Ningxia in multiple rotations. The cooperation helped standardize 65 clinical procedures, while Ningxia medical workers received advanced training in Fujian.

This is more valuable than simply sending equipment. Equipment can become outdated; knowledge can continue generating value. The ultimate objective of cooperation should not be permanent dependence, but increasing capability to stand, compete, and innovate independently. That is the real measure of lasting support.

The economic indicators show the broader transformation. Ningxia's per capita GDP reached 77,981 yuan in 2025, compared with 3,926 yuan in 1996 — nearly a 19-fold increase. During the same period, economic output expanded 33-fold, while rural residents' per capita disposable income increased 22 times.

Ningxia's transformation cannot be attributed to a single program. National policies, infrastructure investment, industrialization, urbanization and other factors have contributed significantly. But the Fujian-Ningxia partnership created a mechanism through which knowledge, capital, technology and people could move across regional boundaries, reinforcing broader change.

Its continuity is equally important. Over 30 years, the partnership has maintained its core principles of complementary strengths, mutual benefit, long-term cooperation and shared development, allowing it to evolve rather than remain trapped in an old assistance model. That continuity has made each stage of cooperation build on the last.

For developing countries facing regional inequality, the lesson is worth considering: cooperation should strengthen local capacity, not create dependence. Poorer regions do not necessarily need to copy richer ones. They need access to resources, technology, institutions and markets that allow them to build upon their own strengths.

The key question should therefore not be, "how much assistance can one region give another?" but, "how can cooperation make both regions more capable?"

After five visits, I no longer see the Fujian-Ningxia partnership simply as a poverty-alleviation program. I see it as an example of cooperation turning differences into advantages.

A coastal province and an inland autonomous region have different landscapes, economic structures, and development challenges. Yet their experience shows that regional inequality is not necessarily permanent. It can be reduced through sustained partnership, policy continuity, and adaptation, with each side shaping the process in different ways.

Development is not a race in which every region must move forward in the same way. It is a process of connecting strengths, sharing opportunities, and expanding possibilities.

The real success of Fujian-Ningxia is not simply that Fujian helped Ningxia. It is that the partnership became reciprocal over time.

It is that, over time, Fujian and Ningxia learned how to help each other.

And perhaps that is the most enduring definition of meaningful development cooperation: not creating dependence, but creating the confidence, capacity and connections that allow people and regions to shape their own future.

The author is a senior lecturer and researcher in the School of Overseas Education (School of Foreign Languages) at Sanming University in East China's Fujian province, and a research fellow at the Sanming University-Shanghai International Studies University Joint Research Center for Hungarian Studies, and also a senior research fellow at the Daffodil International University Belt and Road Research Centre in Bangladesh.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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