YINCHUAN, China-Less than an hour’s drive outside Yinchuan, capital city of the Ningxia Hui autonomous region in China’s West, a newly constructed village houses some of the poorest people in the country, resettled from the arid South, so they can earn a few cents more a day. There are no fixed-line phones, but the GSM network is functioning, bringing the place just a bit closer to the outside world.
A crumbling section of China’s ancient Great Wall runs through the autonomous region of Ningxia, but the place is far away from the skyscrapers and bustling, wheeling and dealing in coastal cities, such as Shanghai and Guangzhou. In China’s underdeveloped West, millions are still scraping by to make a living.
On a reporting trip sponsored by the region’s foreign affairs department, my female colleague of Voice of America (VOA) and I politely request to talk to some of the poorest people. And we are free to talk to anybody we would like; the people are not dissidents. Thanks to government relief efforts, they have new hope to improve their daily lives. It had not rained in the area from which they came for more than two years.
In the village, called Huaji, Han-Chinese live next to ethnic Huis, who are Muslims. At the edge of the village, a nondescript building houses the local mosque. Five times a day, the mosque calls the faithful for their daily prayers. My colleague and I are cordially invited to witness the 5 p.m. prayer service, which would certainly not be allowed in fundamentalist Iran or Saudi Arabia.
Electricity lights up single bulbs in the Spartan houses, but fixed-line phones are nowhere to be seen. I flip out my mobile GSM phone and perform the ultimate connectivity test. I call my wife in Beijing. Her voice comes through loud and clear.
The local people here are too poor to afford a handset, but nevertheless, the number of mobile-phone subscribers in Ningxia is already increasing faster than fixed-line subscribers. In the first six months of the year, the region added 63,000 mobile users-2,000 more than the 61,000 new fixed-line customers.
Fast-expanding GSM networks bring instant communication to places where no fixed-line phone has gone before.
