The East is Red Plaza is Changing! Wangfujing Plaza is Coming!
-An advertisement for a new shopping mall development in Yinchuan's Old City
Like many cities in west China, understanding Yinchuan's recent surge in economic and infrastructure development is to understand the growth and development of two separate cities. There's the area that previously fit inside the city walls, referred to by locals as the "Old City," which comprises part of Yinchuan's Jingfeng and XingQing districts. This part of the city retains a lot of the quirks and features of the city's past. The streets are narrow, the buildings are relatively low and close together. In the midst of a city block, you're likely to suddenly run into one of the city's many historic structures, like the Ming Dynasty Drum Tower or Jade Emperor Palace, or the Pair of pagodas built during the Western Xia period (roughly 900-1100).
While the Old City has gone through its share of development in the last twenty years, it still bears many of the hallmarks of an older city. Much of the core of the Old City was renovated in the 1990s. During interviews, longtime residents of the city repeatedly described Yinchuan as it was in the wake of the Mao Era. The descriptions all hinged around just how small Yinchuan was. Respondents often described the city as having the feel of a farming village, despite its size and status as a provincial capital. The vast majority of buildings in the city were small single-level pingfang style courtyard houses. One man who'd lived in the city for over 30 years remarked that, prior to the rebuilding of the core of the city, you could stand near the Zhongsi Mosque near the Old City's western edge, and have an unobstructed view of the Drum Tower which stood nearly 1.5 kilometers away. Starting in the 1990s, Yinchuan replaced a lot of these smaller homes with 6 or 7 floor concrete apartment towers. In this sense, Yinchuan's development mirrors a lot of what has happened throughout cities in China over the last three decades. The process of chai qian (or, demolition and replacement, which I've written about here before), in Yinchuan is really no different than the way it has unfolded elsewhere. In the ensuing years, these buildings have aged rapidly. The clunky concrete monoliths Moreover, it's a small city grid, and is very walkable. Walking from the western edge of the Old City to the eastern edge takes as little as 45 minutes. In many ways, Yinchuan's Old City retains the small town feel that many of the people I talked to spoke of.
However, Yinchuan's New City, mostly the expansive XiXia District that stretches out to the west of town, highlights the ways in which Yinchuan's development is in some ways unique to west China. Prior to about 10 years ago, the Xixia District was primarily rural. Interviewees remarked that Xixia used to be a place where people went to buy produce at village markets. It was a place where people bought corn and tomatoes and goji berries. Even in recent years, Ningxia's economy has relied primarily on agriculture. The region has a very limited industrial base, and most people outside of the cities still make their living growing crops or raising livestock. Until recently, Xixia was not much different from the rest of the province in this respect. And in some ways, despite recent changes, Xixia remains much the same as it was. As the most expansive of Yinchuan's urban districts, Xixia still is home to much of the city's urban farmland.
However, beginning in 2000, the city began to rapidly expand westward. Farmland quickly turned into an ideal location for development of a commercial and shopping district. What followed was an explosion of building and development. Xixia is now home to huge commercial centers, like the WanDa Shopping Mall, where shoppers purchase name brand designer clothing, like Zara or Calvin Klein, and can visit cafes that serve premium roast coffee, and imported beer. Xixia is also home to office towers where commerce and banking have become prominent employment sectors. As a city increasingly tied to doing business with the Middle East and Central Asia, Yinchuan's service sector is growing rapidly, and the building boom occurring in Xixia relfects this.
So what's driving this expansion and change? Primarily, this is the outcome of sustained, targeted development efforts aimed at western China. The program, known as the Great Western Development Campaign (xibu da kaifa, 西部大开发) aimed to bring western China, which had lagged behind the east in terms of infrastructure and GDP development, up to the same level as the coastal eastern regions. Part of this expansive and ambitious project was a push to make western China more urban. In the last 15 years, Yinchuan's population has ballooned with the arrival of migrants. Time and again during interviews, I was told that Yinchuan was an "yimin chengshi," (移民城市) a city of migrants. Interviewees explained that over the last two decades the government sponsored increased migration from small towns and villages in the countryside, in particular the impoverished mountain district in the south of the province. Additionally, migrants had streamed in to Yinchuan from outside the province: from Sichuan and Chongqing to the south, from Zhejiang and Jiangsu to the east, from nearby Gansu and Qinghai. These migrants came for different reasons: to work construction crews, to run international investment offices, to open restaurants, etc.
What is the net effect of this kind of migration? For one thing, it's made Yinchuan a city of blended regional cultures. I was often told that it was difficult to find anyone who could be considered a "local" to Yinchuan, given that they had, at most, lived in the city for 10 years. Yinchuan, respondents told me, had taken on the characteristics of the places these migrants had come from. In the Hui community, specifically, such migration continued to change the cultural landscape. With the arrival of migrants from the more heavily Hui-populated countryside and from Hui communities outside of Ningxia, new aspects of Islamic thought and culture have come to Yinchuan. In parts of the city where the migrant population is larger, mosques are more strictly divided along sectarian lines. Islamic traditionalism is also more prevalent in these communities: more people wear headscarves and prayer hats. The vast number of attendees to prayer sessions on days other than Fridays are migrants from these rural communities, as are the majority of students at the city's Qur'anic Studies Institute for training Imams.
In many senses, the impact of migration on cities like Yinchuan extends beyond economic and infrastructural circumstances. As Hui from throughout Ningxia and China's southwest relocate to Yinchuan, they enter into conversation with locals about what being Hui means from religious and cultural perspectives. It's yet another aspect of the complex phenomenon of urbanization as it occurs throughout China.