RECRUITMENT MOMENTUM
The XPCC maintains military structural titles such as divisions and regiments, and has its own administration and judicial bodies. It now has nearly 4,000 enterprises and 28 industrial parks and has built six cities or towns, including Shihezi and Alaer.
Han Jun, secretary of the Communist Party of China Branch of the Second Company of the 14th Regiment under the First Division, came to Aksu in southern Xinjiang in 2005, after graduating from Sichuan Agricultural University in southwest China's Sichuan Province.
"I felt sort of repentant about my decision when I arrived here by train to see the desolate area with just one road and several buildings, " Han remembers. He wanted to return to his hometown in Sichuan.
"But I got much care from the regiment's authorities. I had free housing in the first three years and only paid a small sum in rent after that. Any difficulty I came across could be solved rapidly with the help of others," Han says.
He decided to stay and has witnessed great change here, including more roads and buildings. He married a local girl who graduated from Tarim University in Alaer City.
For Xin Min, a senior official in charge of organization work with the First Regiment, all these young couples are emblematic of how attractive Xinjiang has become to budding talents.
Few students from outside Xinjiang showed interest in the jobs the XPCC offered in the past, according to the official.
But things have changed in recent years. Capable and diligent college graduates have been recruited and some of them have been chosen for key posts, the official says.
From 2011 to 2012, the XPCC recruited 10,420 college graduates, accounting for half of the total which it has absorbed in the past six years.
Guo Lingji, an XPCC organization official, adds that from 2010 to 2012, an average 77 percent of employed college students decided to continue working for the XPCC after their initial three-year term, compared with 30 percent to 40 percent before.
"It is satisfying for me to make use of my talent. As a young man, I feel I have found my own arena in the XPCC," says Zhou Xianqiang, also from Sichuan, who came to work in Xinjiang in 2006 and just got married to a local woman last month.
As for Yan Fenfen, she plans to build a long-term career in Xinjiang cultivating the region's famous red dates. "My new dream is to build a Chinese date research center to enrich the varieties of local Chinese dates," she says.
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