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Farmers in the far west of China might be living on a different planet from workers in Beijing’s booming biotech firms…

Kasam Sayim, farmer

KASAM SAYIM doesn’t have a cellphone and has never used a computer. “I’m an old man. I have no use for them,” he says.

Sayim is a 63-year-old grape farmer from Hando village in Xinjiang province in north-west China. He is Uighur, a member of a Muslim minority group that has its own language and uses a modified Arabic script. Sayim doesn’t speak Mandarin.

The Turpan basin, where he lives, is the second lowest place on Earth apart from the Dead Sea. It gets so hot and dry that from May to October the villagers drag their beds – and often their TV sets – outside and sleep under the stars. Officially Xinjiang province, some 3000 kilometres west of Beijing, is in the same time zone as the capital. But Sayim and his neighbours set their clocks to “Xinjiang time”, 2 hours behind Beijing – in part to keep in sync with daylight but also as a subtle expression of local autonomy. He drives a small motorised cart but has never been to Ürümqi, the provincial capital, 320 kilometres away.

“It gets so hot and dry that from May to October villagers drag their beds outside to sleep under the stars”

Relatively wealthy among his peers, Sayim has seven sheep, about 1 hectare of farmland and six children – all of whom were born before official efforts to limit population growth came into effect. His children all have cellphones and one, who attended university, uses email on a computer at work.

While Sayim has resisted the temptation to go wireless, he does have a landline which he uses to phone relatives and to check on the price of grapes. When 91av visited in August, they were netting about $0.60 per kilogram. In a good year, Sayim and his family can make about $5300 selling their grapes and raisins.

On a typical day, Sayim gets up at 5 am to pray, the first of five times he will face west towards Mecca. Usually he is asleep by 9 pm. From late August to mid-September, most of his waking hours are spent harvesting the grapes. Before lunch and in the evening, the men cart basketfuls of grapes to a single-roomed mud-brick building where the women hang them up by the bunch to dry. Winds blowing through the latticed walls will turn the grapes into raisins within three weeks.

The grape-growing industry has experienced a boom in recent years and most farmers in the region seem to be prospering. In part, this has been fuelled by an emerging wine industry – although Sayim, as a Muslim, does not drink alcohol.

But not all of western China’s rural communities are thriving. In neighbouring Gansu province, a crippling drought has left millions in dire poverty. In 2005, the average annual net income of a farmer in Gansu was about $150. And while Uighurs in the Turpan basin seem to enjoy relative cultural and religious freedom, Uighur separatist movements closer to the Kazakh border have been brutally suppressed in recent years.

Even in this remote corner of China, changes wrought by the nation’s economic development are beginning to take root. When Sayim was a teenager he helped dig and maintain the karez, an underground irrigation system that brings snowmelt from distant mountains to his village. His payment for a summer’s work was three sheep and a 50-kilogram bag of corn. Today, Sayim would rather his grandchildren stay on at school than work on the karez. “Going to college is the most important thing they can do,” he says.

Wang Lingyun, scientist

“DOES Julie Andrews really sing in The Sound of Music?” Wang “Lillian” Lingyun is debating musicals with a colleague. It is late Friday afternoon, and we’re enjoying the weekly happy hour, when staff at the Beijing labs of Danish biotech firm Novo Nordisk meet to gossip, snack, and discuss allegedly lip-synching nuns.

It has been a busy day. Wang’s first task each morning is to check the experiments left to run overnight. Her team is seeking proteins with a high affinity for receptors on the surface of cancer cells in the hope of turning them into drugs. One of today’s proteins looks promising, and so will be tested further. As Wang stacks the samples, she enthuses about the work. “Proteins are like people. They each have their own personality,” she says. “Some are very fragile. You should take care of them.”

After gaining a PhD at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biophysics in Beijing, Wang chose to use her skills in drug discovery. Curing cancer is close to her heart, as both of her parents died of the disease within a few years of each other while she was a student.

Ten minutes drive away is the apartment the 32-year-old owns with her husband. They met during their undergraduate studies at Jilin University in Changchun, north-east China. He now works for a clinical trials company in the same science park. Their wedding was more modest than those of friends, because it fell during the 2003 SARS epidemic, when people avoided large gatherings for fear of infection.

The couple chose their apartment because of its garden, where Wang grows cucumbers, chilli, tomatoes and a cherry tree. For the short commute, she bought a new Ford Focus in 2005. A colleague overhears us discussing the car and teases: “She is rich!” Wang bristles and shoots back: “You’re just saving your money.”

Wang is coy about how much she earns. But she suggests that a scientist with a PhD can earn $1000 to $1300 per month working for a pharmaceutical company – more if employed by a western firm. Competition for jobs is high. Foreign-trained Chinese scientists, especially those returning from the US, are beating researchers from local universities to the best jobs. “I’m lucky,” says Wang. “Now it’s almost impossible for a fresh PhD to get a job here.”

“Foreign-trained Chinese scientists are beating researchers from local universities to the best jobs”

Over a working lunch of western fast food, Lillian gives a presentation in English on breast cancer genetics to around 30 colleagues. But her life is not all hard work. She regularly meets friends at restaurants in central Beijing, and recently learned to ride. “The horse is so tall, while I am so small,” she smiles.

Work also merges with social life, through company “family days”, which have ranged from an auction to raise money for children with diabetes in north-west China to a day out planting trees near the Great Wall.

Then there is the happy hour. But now it is time for Wang to jump into the company minibus to play badminton at the local sports centre. The Julie Andrews debate will have to wait for another week.