People who have been to Xinjiang Wulukosa know that the local soil is severely salinized.
When Xinjiang was liberated initially, hordes of military agricultural corps swarmed in by truckloads.
The older generation of Uighur people still remember those young men in dark green military uniforms specifically choosing those vast and even wastelands. Come spring, they dug wells to divert the meltwater from the Southern Tian Shan to water the saline-alkali soil to reduce its alkalinity.
Subsequently, they planted fields of rapeseed to improve the soil, after summer arrived, rows of rapeseed were cut down uniformly by reaping machines, and then oil sunflowers were planted as green manure.
Under the sun, the salt in the soil surfaced like dandruff, and people scraped it away.
It took an entire generation of various green manures, animal manures, and straw, and only when those dark green uniforms had faded to gray-green, and even gray.
