A Beacon of Hope

When I first watched the 2021 TV series Minning Town, I was wondering why Minning is spelt with a double N. I had thought the story is about people in a town involved in mining activities but later towards the third episode, it was explained that Minning is the name of a new settlement. In 1997, in an effort to eradicate poverty in China, farmers from one of the poorest, uninhabitable places in Ningxia were resettled in a more habitable region in the Gobi Desert near the Yellow River. The more affluent coastal province of Fujian was then tasked with helping develop the new settlement. The then deputy secretary of the Fujian Provincial Party Committee and the leader of the Fujian-Ningxia poverty-alleviation leading group, Xi Jinping had named the new settlement Minning, deriving it from the two places involved, Fujian and Ningxia; Min, being the Chinese abbreviation of Fujian, and Ning is short for Ningxia. Through hard work and sheer grit and the help of entrepreneurs and over 100 poverty-alleviation officials, the settlers succeeded in building the place from scratch, turning it into 40,000 acres of vineyards. While Minning Town, the 2021 TV series had made the town a popular attraction with many tourists, the success of the settlement had lured people from Asia, Africa and Latin America intend on learning the secret of alleviating poverty  in the Gobi Desert. A beacon of hope, it is!