Source: Xinhua news agency, Beijing, in English 0103 gmt 7 May 96

Xining, 7th May: Half of northwest China's remaining 400,000 households of nomadic herdsmen have bid farewell to a lifestyle that has spanned thousands of years. About 200,000 households of horseback herdsmen have finally settled down, ending their traditional nomadic lives.

Generations of Tibetans, Mongolians and some other nationalities had been moving about in search of new pastures in the vast northwest China, boasting of some 100m ha of grassland, for thousands of years. However, the out-dated living style could neither take full advantage of pastures or cope with natural disasters, nor facilitate the modernization drive of social lives in the area.

Since the mid-1980s, the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu and Qinghai, as well as Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, have been engaged in a series of pasture-building projects, in a bid to complete the historical work of helping horseback nationalities settle down.

Over the past 12 years, governments at all levels have poured 300m yuan into Qinghai Province, in a move to fund the building of pastures. The province has already completed more than 600,000 ha of fenced pasture land and added 400,000 ha of man-planted grassland, helping 56,000 of the 100,000 households within the province settle down. In Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a total of 80,000 herdsmen and their families have already settled down.

During the process of modernization drive, new townships have mushroomed in the boundless northwest China, with the emergence of the first group of modern herdsmen who are skilful in trading.