I am a journalist who has, for many years, followed and reported on Shanghai's paired-assistance work in Xinjiang. Since 2018, I have travelled many times to the four counties of Shache, Zepu, Yecheng and Bachu in Kashgar Prefecture, the region of Xinjiang that Shanghai supports under the national paired-assistance programme, and have witnessed at first hand how this Shanghai-led assistance has brought about a historic shift, from 'transfusing aid' to 'generating growth', and from 'poverty alleviation' to 'building intellectual capacity.' Today, taking 'Xinjiang cotton' as my case study, I will share with you how institutional innovation with Chinese characteristics has driven coordinated regional development, and how it offers a workable path for addressing similar challenges around the world.
When you hear the words 'Xinjiang cotton,' what is the first thing that comes to mind? Is it an endless white sea of cotton stretching to the horizon, or is it the long-standing misunderstanding, disinformation and slander directed at us by some Western media? Last month, our team travelled once again to Bachu in Xinjiang, the area supported by Shanghai under the paired-assistance programme and the largest cotton distribution hub in southern Xinjiang, where cotton fields cover 1.66 million mu (approximately 111,000 hectares). There, we carried out a special piece of reporting, and I would now like to invite you to watch a short film that has only just been completed and has not yet been broadcast.
Summary of the video package:
Cotton growing in Xinjiang has a long history and benefits from an environment well suited to it, and cotton has become a thread connecting different points along the Silk Road. Bachu, as a textile centre, is home to the only dyeing and printing industrial zone in Kashgar Prefecture and accounts for more than a quarter of Xinjiang's cotton output. Shanghai's assistance to Xinjiang, which has continued without interruption since 1997, has driven forward local industrial development, upgraded tourism and improved people's livelihoods. Xinjiang cotton is sold not only within China but is also exported, via the China–Europe freight trains, to Central Asia, Eastern Europe and beyond, with high value-added products accounting for over 60 per cent of these exports, a clear indication of the significant industrial upgrading achieved in Xinjiang. The cotton industry has also driven the export of agricultural technology and cooperation on production capacity, providing Belt and Road countries with a stable supply of raw materials and employment opportunities.
This film will be broadcast for the first time this evening, so what you have just seen is, quite literally, fresh off the press. I imagine our sharp-eyed audience will already have recognised one of its central figures, the Xinjiang cotton farmer Nurmemet, who joins us here today. I will now put a few brief questions to him.
Leng Wei: Nurmemet and I met just last month, at the busiest point in the cotton season. Now that it is November, how has the harvest turned out?
Nurmemet: The harvest is now complete. This year's yield was 510 kg per mu (approximately 7,650 kg per hectare), up 30 kg per mu (approximately 450 kg per hectare) on last year.
Leng Wei: To put 510 kg per mu in context, the average yield across Xinjiang currently stands at around 465 kg per mu (roughly 6,975 kg per hectare), so your harvest is outstanding indeed. This is your third year growing cotton. What, in your view, has been the greatest challenge, and what support have you received from the local government or agricultural authorities?
Nurmemet: I faced a great many difficulties when I first started out. The government provided us with training, teaching us when to sow, when to water, and when to apply pesticide.
Leng Wei: Yes, I saw on your WeChat Moments that you went specially to attend a training course. I first got to know Nurmemet through his farming cooperative. He is twenty-six years old and already earns a gross annual income of 6 million yuan from cotton alone, a young leader whose success left our whole reporting team astonished. Could I ask how many tractors you own yourself, and how many jobs your work now supports?
Nurmemet: Our cooperative has thirty employees, all of them from our village: ten tractor drivers, one production manager, one accountant and eighteen field workers.
Leng Wei: What is the highest wage among them?
Nurmemet: The highest earner takes home just over 4,000 yuan a month.
Leng Wei: And what does an ordinary employee earn?
Nurmemet: Around 3,500 yuan, generally.
Leng Wei: Around 3,500 yuan, which is already a considerable income locally. You have set aside a heavy workload to be with us today, so I imagine there is a great deal you would like to say to our guests here. As an agricultural leader, what would you say in response to Western accusations of so-called 'forced labour' in Xinjiang?
Nurmemet: A single person picking cotton by hand can manage at most 10 mu (approximately 0.7 hectares) a month, whereas a machine can pick 180 to 200 mu (approximately 12 to 13 hectares) in a single day. The best picking season for Xinjiang cotton lasts only a month and a half to two months, and over an area as vast as ours, hand-picking alone could never get the harvest in within a year. Put simply, only a 'fool' would use that many people to pick it.
Leng Wei: Thank you, Nurmemet, for sharing that with us.
Building on what Nurmemet has told us, I would like to offer some further explanation.
According to the latest figures from the China Cotton Association, as of 31 October 2025, cotton picking nationwide had reached 94.5 per cent, with the figure in Xinjiang reaching as high as 94.9 per cent. Through improved cotton varieties and innovative approaches to cultivation and management, Xinjiang's average yield has been kept above 460 kg per mu (around 6,900 kg per hectare). Technologies such as BeiDou-guided sowing, drone-based crop protection and intelligent irrigation are now in widespread use, and the overall rate of mechanisation across tillage, sowing and harvesting exceeds 97 per cent. The high degree of modernisation achieved by Xinjiang's cotton industry is plain to see.
In 2024, Xinjiang's total cotton output reached 5.686 million tonnes, accounting for 92.3 per cent of the national total and placing it first in the country for the thirty-second consecutive year. Cotton quality this year has generally been good, and the purchase price of seed cotton has remained stable at between 6.1 and 6.5 yuan per kilogram, safeguarding the incomes of cotton farmers. These facts stand in stark contrast to the picture of Xinjiang painted by certain voices in international opinion. As the Romanian translator Luo Yang has observed, the approach taken by Western media is rather like switching off the lights and then persuading you that something white is in fact black. By showing you how the Xinjiang cotton industry has developed, we hope to switch every light back on, out in the open, so that everyone can see the facts as they truly are. At the same time, we would like to explore just what significance this assistance mechanism, one so distinctively Chinese in character, might hold for the wider world.
Since the assistance programme began, Bachu offers a telling example: cotton output there has risen by 20 per cent, exports have grown by 30 per cent, and more than 5,000 new jobs have been created, while the film also shows a notably high employment rate among university graduates. China's paired-assistance mechanism embodies a distinctly Chinese wisdom and reflects the great achievements China has made in poverty alleviation and in the coordinated development of urban and rural areas. This owes much to an approach to economic development that places people first, with different departments working in coordination in service of the nation as a whole. Against a global backdrop in which the gulf between rich and poor, and the divide between North and South, continue to hold back the development of poorer countries, China's model of 'pairing up' for mutual support has enabled developed and less-developed regions to draw on one another's strengths, offering a Chinese solution to this global challenge. It is also an important lesson that China's model of collaborative development offers the world.
Watch the whole speech here: