In today’s China, to get rich is perilous

livemint.com:

qingzhen. The term is Chinese for “pure and true" and can mean both halal and Islamic (mosques are known as qingzhen temples). Ningxia officials built a halal industrial park with room for hundreds of companies in Wuzhong, a majority-Muslim city of 1.4m people.

Showing keen political instincts, officials tied these plans to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Xi Jinping’s globe-spanning infrastructure scheme. The BRI was designed in part to link backwaters such as Ningxia to new markets in Eurasia. In 2015 Ningxia’s government urged firms making halal food and Islamic clothing to “firmly grasp the strategic opportunities" of the BRI by deepening ties with Muslim countries in the Middle East as well as Central and South-East Asia.

That same year local officials set a target for the output of Wuzhong’s halal industrial park to hit a whopping 30bn yuan by 2020 ($4.2bn at current exchange rates). Propaganda outlets held up Hui entrepreneurs as model workers. In 2016 the Guangming Ribao, a newspaper under the control of the party’s central committee, profiled the Yang Haji Halal Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Industrial Development Company, a producer of animal feed in the rural county of Tongxin.

Its founder, Yang Jian, whose honorific “Haji" denotes a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca, described how he guaranteed halal traceability for every sack of feed leaving his factory. The market potential was “huge", the writers reported, lamenting that so few Chinese halal firms had international brands. Looking back, 2016 marked a high point of official enthusiasm for halal exports.