Lower development level

Most members of the country's ethnic groups live in western areas, with the Hui people comprising one-third of Ningxia's population.

The Hui mainly inhabit Ningxia, the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, and Gansu, Qinghai, Henan and Hebei provinces.

All 65 families from a southern village in Ningxia arrived in Minning during a phase of large-scale resettlement in 2012. Hai Fugui, a Hui community organizer, was among them. He said he had been thinking of relocating in previous years, and subsequently paid 12,000 yuan for subsidized housing in Minning.

He said the weather is "strange" in his old village, which is near the city of Guyuan, where the average annual rainfall is less than 500 millimeters.

Hai, 63, has kept photos to show his grandchildren. He works for a Party unit, while his son works in a winery and his daughter-in-law is a cook.

The level of development in western regions of the country has traditionally been lower due to a host of factors. In a 2015 paper on "inclusive poverty alleviation," Tang Xiumei of Southwest University in Chongqing, cited natural reasons, inadequate infrastructure and preferential policies for the coastal southeast that needed "to play catch-up with the developed world" compared with inland areas.