Mohammad Saiyedul Islam tries picking up goji berries during his visit to Ningxia Hui autonomous region. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
On my fifth visit to Northwest China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region this year, I saw more clearly that the Fujian-Ningxia partnership is a model of how cooperation can turn differences into advantages.
My first visit was in 2021, when Ningxia and East China's Fujian province marked the 25th anniversary of their partnership. Five years later, I could see more clearly what three decades of cooperation had produced.
The most striking change was not a new building, industrial park, or modern road. It was something less visible but far more important: a growing sense that a region once constrained by poverty and difficult geography had acquired new choices. That is why the partnership matters so much to me.
That, to me, is the central lesson of the Fujian-Ningxia partnership: cooperation expands choices and turns differences into advantages.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the pairing program, launched in 1996 as part of China's broader East-West cooperation program to reduce regional disparities. Fujian, a relatively prosperous coastal province, was paired with Ningxia, a landlocked region in northwestern China, particularly its desert and mountainous areas.
Thirty years later, the relationship has moved far beyond its original purpose. What began with poverty alleviation has evolved into industrial cooperation, technology transfer, human-capital development, employment, agricultural innovation, healthcare, education, and market integration. This evolution shows how the partnership has deepened over time.
The deeper lesson is that successful regional assistance needs an exit strategy — not an end to cooperation, but a shift from assistance to partnership that builds lasting capacity and shared development.
Over three decades, Fujian has allocated 7.68 billion yuan ($1.13 billion) for assistance to Ningxia. More than 4,100 cooperative projects have benefited approximately 2.44 million people. More than 160 demonstration villages and 423 relocation communities have been established. About 450,000 people were lifted out of poverty, while around 840,000 residents were relocated from environmentally fragile areas.
The more important question is what happened after the initial poverty-reduction efforts. The answer is increasingly visible in the regional economy, where the partnership's next phase has taken shape.
Fujian brought capital, technology, management expertise and market connections. Ningxia contributed land, resources and new development opportunities. Their differences became complementary rather than divisive.
Industrial cooperation is one of the clearest signs of this transition. Fujian and Ningxia have jointly built 12 industrial parks, hosting nearly 400 companies and generating annual output approaching 35 billion yuan. Around 6,000 Fujian-owned enterprises operate steadily in Ningxia.
This matters because poverty reduction cannot depend on government assistance indefinitely. Sustainable development requires businesses to create jobs and find markets, workers to acquire skills, supply chains to strengthen, and local economies to generate new sources of income. In this way, industrial cooperation becomes the link between assistance and self-sustaining growth.
Human mobility has also become an important part of the partnership. As of September 2025, 55,000 workers from Ningxia had secured long-term jobs in Fujian after targeted training at Ningxia Sanjiang Technical School. The Hemei Network's E-Commerce Workshop, recognized among the fifth Global Best Poverty Reduction Case Studies, has also helped create employment for women and generates average annual sales of 10 million yuan.
People are not merely beneficiaries of development; they are its most important carriers. A trained worker takes knowledge home, while a businessperson or student exposed to new markets and ideas can create opportunities for others. In this sense, human mobility becomes a form of development infrastructure, linking personal movement to broader regional change.
Ningxia offers a particularly striking lesson: innovation can overcome geographical limitations.
Ningxia is far from the sea, yet it has developed a growing inland aquaculture industry. In 2022, a collaboration between Fujian universities and Ningxia enterprises successfully farmed large coastal yellow croakers in inland saline-alkaline ponds using saline-alkaline water simulated seawater aquaculture technology. After years of experimentation and technical problem-solving, marine fish farming became a reality. Ningxia now produces more than 2,000 tons of seafood annually.
The significance goes beyond fish. It demonstrates that development does not always require eliminating geographical disadvantages; technology can sometimes redefine them. This example shows how innovation turns a local constraint into a new development path.
The introduction of Juncao technology to Pengyang county offers another example. Developed by Professor Lin Zhanxi of Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, the technology helped more than 17,500 households in the Xihaigu region escape poverty over a decade.
For developing regions, the lesson is clear: technology becomes transformative not when it is simply imported, but when it is adapted to local realities. That is what gives it lasting value.
A splendid view of the Shapotou scenic area, which features both desert and Yellow River landscapes, in Zhongwei, Ningxia Hui autonomous region. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
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.