A CHANCE MEETING IN NINGXIA

AFTER landing at Beijing Capital Airport, it was a race against time to get to Terminal 2 to catch our flight to Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia. We were a group of eight journalists travelling to China’s autonomous regions of Ningxia and Xinjiang.

As the world continues to criticise Beijing over the imposition of religious restrictions and re-education of indigenous communities such as the Uyghurs, we were invited by the government to witness China’s endeavours to promote the economic and social development and cultural preservation of the ethnic groups in these regions.

Upon landing at Yinchuan Hedong International Air­port, we were received by Ishag Yang Xuehai, an official from the Ningxia Foreign Affairs Office, and his colleagues.

His name struck me as unique, so I decided to find out more about him and his background.

Ishag was born to a Muslim family, and braved a tough childhood

It was on our last day in Yinchuan when Ishag opened up about himself. Born to a Muslim family in 1986, a time when life was still extremely harsh in the rural areas of northwest China, his childhood was shaped by biting winter winds and hunger.

He delved deeper into the challenges that he faced while growing up. “Memories of my school days remain vivid and etched in my mind, even after decades,” he said.

“My home was 4km from my school. Each winter fierce northwest winds swept across the land, swirling up clouds of sand and dust and I wore only a few thin cotton-padded jackets while wrapping my head in a green wool scarf that my mother had worn on her wedding day,” Ishag said.

Life was even tougher when he entered junior high school, as that was located even further away, 20km from his home. He couldn’t walk that far every day, so he became a boarder.

The students in the hostel would be served boiled potatoes, seasoned only with a little rapeseed oil and chili powder, or mushy yellow millet mixed with a small amount of white rice, which offered little nutritional value.

Ishag recalled how he would bring steamed buns from home with him every week. “The cold winter air kept them edible for several days but there was no refrigerator during summer. We only had simple wooden lockers at school for storage, so the buns would turn mouldy and sour within three days at the most. Hunger was my constant companion during my boarding years,” he said.

“Times were tough but my parents never bowed to fate or surrendered to poverty. My father borrowed money to buy an agricultural truck, which he simply modified to run a passenger transport service. The crude vehicle lacked proper safety protections and posed significant risks, yet it was our family’s primary source of income back then. Throughout the freezing winters, my father huddled over the steering wheel in the windy truck cabin.

“My mother shouldered an even heavier burden. Single-handedly, she raised three head of cattle, farmed nearly a hectare of land and worked tirelessly from dawn till dusk. To earn extra income, we planted large fields of melons every year. In the arid, barren northwest, plastic mulch farming was the best way to preserve soil moisture and guarantee a harvest. Yet under the scorching summer sun, weeds still sprouted wildly beneath the mulch, stealing the scarce water and nutrients and gradually tearing the plastic film apart.”

Ishag says that to protect the crop yields, his mother had to reach her arms deep under the blazing-hot plastic mulch at midday to pull out weeds. Trapped beneath the film, the air was sweltering and suffocating. The scalding plastic burned and chafed her arms.

“I deeply understood my parents’ hardships. I knew that for a child like me, born into an ordinary rural family, studying hard was the only way out and perseverance was the only path to change my fate. With no other choice, I pressed forward relentlessly.

Fuelled by sheer determination, he was able to rewrite his destiny with excellent academic results, leaving the barren countryside behind for a better future. He concluded with a smile, saying that he was a witness to the hardships of that impoverished era, and fortunate to be part of China’s rapid development and remarkable progress after decades of toil.

Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2026