Published on: 2026-09-10
Source: People’s Republic of China — Translation
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Lanzhou, September 10 /Xinhua/ — The northwestern inland regions of China are arid areas with extremely low precipitation; the annual average rainfall does not exceed 400 mm and is less than 200 mm in most areas. Nevertheless, in recent years a significant amount of aquatic products produced in this region has been reaching Russian family tables.
At the end of August, a batch of frozen rainbow trout weighing about 89 tons was shipped from Yongjing County in the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture of Gansu Province (Northwest China) to the Russian city of Vladivostok. This is the first case of exporting unique fish products grown in the highland areas of this province to Russia.
Yongjing County is located at the junction of the Loess Plateau and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau at an altitude of over 1500 meters above sea level. The Yellow River flows through the northern part of the county. In the 1970s, a large hydroelectric power station was built on the Yellow River here, resulting in the formation of the Liujiaxia Reservoir with an area of over 130 square kilometers. Since 2011, with the support of research institutions and universities in China, the scale of rainbow trout farming in the region has been steadily increasing.
Rainbow trout is a cold-water fish of high latitudes. Unlike traditional producing countries of rainbow trout, such as Norway and the USA, coastal areas of China mostly have warm marine waters that are unsuitable for salmon farming. In the 1980s and 1990s, China imported rainbow trout in large quantities from abroad to meet domestic demand.
In recent years, the situation has changed dramatically. Thanks to the continuous improvement of transport infrastructure and the steady expansion of the domestic consumer market, the potential of aquaculture in the high-altitude northwestern regions of China is gradually being realized.
In the neighboring Qinghai province, local products from the Longyangxia reservoir have long been supplied to Russia. According to available data, in 2025, the export of rainbow trout from Qinghai province to Russia accounted for about 10 percent of all imports of this fish into Russia. In other words, every tenth kilogram of rainbow trout imported into Russia comes from the high-altitude reservoirs of Qinghai province.
According to Zou Huiquan, chairman of the board of Gansu Wenxiang Ecological Fisheries Co., Ltd., over the past decade domestic production of rainbow trout in China has increased from several thousand tons to tens of thousands of tons. However, production volumes remain limited compared to European and American producers. It takes time to scale up the production of this type of fish in China, he added.
In the northwest of China, more and more land traditionally considered arid and infertile is being transformed into a “testing ground” for agricultural development. This is part of the country’s efforts to improve the efficiency of land use through dynamic economic growth and continuous infrastructure enhancement.
Including in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region at the eastern foothills of the Helan Mountains, people use saline-alkaline waters for shrimp farming, and cold water resources for raising rainbow trout and sturgeon. A breakthrough has also been achieved here in industrial salmon farming. At the foothills of the Tianshan Mountains and in the depths of the deserts of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, large-scale breeding of white shrimp, rock perch, and even Australian lobsters has been organized on saline-alkaline soils.
The development of aquaculture in arid regions allows China not only to meet domestic consumer demand but also to expand the export of aquatic products. Thanks to the continuous expansion of openness, aquatic products from China’s high-altitude regions are increasingly appearing on the tables of consumers in Russia and other countries worldwide. -0-
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