Every Eid al-Adha, I receive greetings first: "No matter where you are, have a wonderful holiday."

As a native of Xinjiang, my excitement is palpable. It’s not just about the mouthwatering food; it’s a cultural feast for ethnic minorities.

You won’t truly appreciate the vastness of China until you visit Xinjiang. Upstream of the Ili River, on the western foothills of the Tianshan Mountains, lies a city unlike any other.

The streets are laid out in a Bagua formation, with every road leading to every other, and not a single traffic light in the entire city.

This is Tekes in Xinjiang’s Ili—the City of the Bagua.

In terms of regional development, industry comes first, investment promotion is key, and efficiency is fundamental. We must tightly integrate industrial planning with investment promotion, focusing on the questions of “what to attract, where to attract it, and how to attract it.”

Investment promotion must be precisely aligned with corporate needs and industrial development—this is the role of the industrial map.

Tekes has done exactly this: by mapping out an industrial landscape, filling in gaps along the industrial chain, elevating the level of industry, promoting industrial clustering, and increasing industrial value-added, the city targets key sectors to attract major, high-quality, and promising investors.

Mapping the Landscape: Industrial Foundation Analysis

Every year, many people travel from far and wide just to catch a glimpse of Tekes.

Even though the roads resemble a maze and are bustling with traffic every day, there are no traffic lights, yet traffic never gets stuck.

The most distinctive feature here is the street layout, which resembles a Bagua (Eight Trigrams). Eight main streets radiate outward from the city center, intersecting with four ring roads around the central garden, hence the name “Bagua City.”

Tekes is a county under the jurisdiction of the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, with a total area of 8,352 square kilometers—roughly half the size of Beijing.

It is not only a mountainous county primarily focused on animal husbandry with a combination of agriculture and animal husbandry, but also possesses metal ore deposits such as copper, nickel, cobalt, and gold, as well as construction materials like quartzite and dolomite. It also holds potential for the extraction of coal and other energy resources.

In particular, its outstanding natural ecological conditions—including fertile soil and abundant water, soil, sunlight, and heat resources—provide excellent conditions for the development of green and organic agricultural and pastoral industries, such as beef and mutton production and commercial fruit cultivation.

As a National Agricultural Product Export Demonstration County and a National Green Agriculture Cultivation Demonstration Zone, Tekes features mild winters, cool summers, distinct seasons, clean air, and high levels of negative oxygen ions, earning it the honorary title of “China’s Natural Oxygen Bar.”

It is worth noting that the county possesses distinct comparative advantages in agricultural products and a solid foundation for industrial clustering. The agricultural and sideline products processing industry holds significant development potential, making it easier to leverage the industrial chain.

In recent years, the county has established six green and organic brands: “Tianshan Medicinal Valley,” “Western Region Spices,” “Native Golden Mushrooms,” “Tianshan Honey Sources,” “Health-Promoting Grains,” and “Organic Livestock,” making it a national green raw material base.

For instance, the region is home to livestock such as Kazakh sheep, Xinjiang brown cattle, and poultry including chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl; precious wild mushroom varieties like Asafoetida and Morchella; and valuable wild medicinal herbs including Tianshan Snow Lotus, Stone Lotus, wild Fritillaria, Codonopsis, licorice, sea buckthorn, and blackcurrant.

As a dynamic and promising region brimming with potential, Tekes has partnered with the Guchuan Industrial Research Institute to drive high-quality development, strengthen and optimize industrial chains, and comprehensively foster industrial clusters.

To help introduced enterprises transition from mere "existence" to "excellence," the Guchuan Industrial Research Institute leverages "forward-thinking" and "scientific analysis" as its key tools to formulate more scientifically sound and reasonable industrial layout plans for the region.

It focuses on the development needs and strategic planning of leading enterprises within the industrial chain, gathering and analyzing information on their operational status, technological capabilities, and market share.

Through market research and industrial chain analysis, the institute identifies a list of key supporting enterprises in the region to ensure the integrity and stability of the industrial chain. Simultaneously, it targets these enterprises for investment promotion to enhance local supporting capabilities.

Throughout this process, we also conduct in-depth research on enterprises that have achieved breakthroughs and innovations in key products and technologies, breaking through technical bottlenecks in industrial development to achieve industrial transformation and upgrading.

By continuously and precisely identifying pain points in development needs, and combining the region’s geographical, comparative, industrial, and resource advantages, we provide clear recommendations to address existing bottlenecks. This has resulted in the creation of an industrial map that highlights Tekes’ unique characteristics, aligns with its current industrial landscape, and showcases its competitive strengths.

With six major industries, a single blueprint, and full-cycle guidance, it makes it clear at a glance what the region has, what it lacks, and what it needs to attract—thus defining the scope and charting the course for regional investment promotion efforts.

Moving Beyond Investment Promotion to Fill Industrial Gaps

The foundation of investment promotion lies in thoroughly understanding the local industrial landscape.

First, we must understand the “reasons and consequences” behind corporate investment. Land? Labor? Capital? Technology?

Second, identify opportunities for investment attraction. Have we effectively built, supplemented, strengthened, and extended industrial chains?

For local investment promotion, only by having a thorough understanding of the local industrial chain can efforts be targeted effectively.

What is the current state of the industrial chain? What gaps need to be filled? In which directions can it be extended? What types of enterprises can fill the gaps in specific sub-sectors?

Taking Tekes as an example, after identifying industrial strengths and development trends, the Guchuan Industrial Research Institute focused on six key sectors—black wheat, edible fungi, traditional Chinese medicinal herbs, specialty fruits and nuts, organic livestock, and organic vegetables. Following a step-by-step development model spanning short-, medium-, and long-term horizons, the institute mapped out the development stages for each phase and created a comprehensive and precise industrial investment attraction blueprint. This addresses the region’s critical questions: what to attract, how to attract, and where to attract.

Simply put, compared to merely attracting a single enterprise or securing a single investment, the long-term value lies in implementing projects that foster industrial synergy—connecting scattered enterprises into a network and weaving that network into a cohesive industrial chain.

For example, using the black wheat industry chain as a connecting thread, we can establish an industrial base that integrates black wheat production with stone-ground flour and noodle processing. This creates an upstream-to-downstream industrial chain layout encompassing cultivation, processing, and sales, thereby achieving large-scale, intensive, and standardized development in the grain industry.

By utilizing an industrial map, we can conduct targeted investment promotion for the industrial chain, shifting the focus from quantitative expansion to prioritizing quality and efficiency, thereby creating an investment promotion landscape guided by overall optimized development.

Recently, I came across the Tekes Edible Mushroom Industrial Integration Demonstration Park project, with an annual production capacity of 50,000 tons, which is expected to be completed this September.

This project centers on building a complete edible mushroom industrial chain, achieving integration of production, processing, and sales, and promoting the healthy and green development of Tekes’ edible mushroom industry.

Upon completion, the project will fully realize the industrialization, automation, and standardization of the edible mushroom industry, further expanding the scale of Tekes’ edible mushroom sector and elevating its technological level and competitiveness to the forefront of the entire region.

Additionally, with the 2024 (China) Eurasian Commodity Trade Expo approaching, Tekes will continue to “go global” by leveraging its distinctive industrial chains.

In recent days, leveraging the resource advantages of agriculture, animal husbandry, and forestry and fruit cultivation, Tekes has been promoting distinctive “calling cards” such as “Bagua Fruits,” the “Golden Belt of Native Mushrooms,” “Tianshan Honey Sources,” “Health-Promoting Grains,” and “Organic Livestock.” It has prioritized the export of specialty agricultural and sideline products including honey products, dairy products, meat products, dried fruits, black wheat products, Chinese medicinal herbs, dehydrated vegetables, and specialty beverages.

Within Tekes’ six major industrial frameworks, the top priority is to deepen development along the chains for grain security, high-quality fungi, fruit enhancement, livestock development, as well as medicinal herbs and vegetables. This involves emphasizing variety improvement, quality enhancement, brand building, and standardized production to accelerate the cultivation of a comprehensive agricultural industrial chain and promote the large-scale, industrialized, and market-oriented development of agriculture.

Successfully addressing each "gap" in an industrial chain will lay the foundation for the "crucial battle" of attracting investment.

Guichuan Industrial Research Institute, leveraging its four-dimensional strengths—"industry expertise, planning proficiency, resource access, and investment attraction capabilities"—continues to expand Tekes’ agricultural and sideline product processing sectors, extend industrial chains, and elevate value chains. We strive to achieve the goal of "with this blueprint in hand, we’ve got investment attraction covered," and are fully committed to driving the quality and efficiency of investment attraction along the industrial chain.

In Closing

As a native of Xinjiang, I highly recommend visiting the “City of the Eight Trigrams” for a journey toward the clouds, the grasslands, the rivers, the snow-capped mountains, and above all, toward freedom.

It possesses both the graceful and delicate beauty of the “Jiangnan of the Frontier” and the rugged, vast simplicity of the Western Regions, as well as the profound depth of Central Plains culture and the long-standing heritage of the Wusun culture. We warmly invite friends from all walks of life to visit Tekes, and we especially hope that entrepreneurs will come to Tekes, invest in Tekes, and put down roots here.