Cotton Rush

More than 3,300 cotton pickers pack a train from Zhengzhou, Henan province, to Xinjiang, with barely enough space to move in the carriages. Photo: Wu Jiaxiang

A cotton picker carries a bag of cotton through the field. Photo: Wu Jiaxiang

Every year, tens of thousands of migrant workers flock to Xinjiang to harvest cotton, their voyage comparable to the Spring Festival travel peak.

Every fall, the sparsely populated Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region employs waves of laborers from Central and Western provinces to harvest the farm produce on the vast land.

Farmers from provinces including Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan and Shandong make up the majority of this army of cotton pickers.

Within a month starting late August, more than 100,000 farmers boarded the trains to Xinjiang from Zhengzhou Railway Station alone in Henan, traveling more than 3,000 kilometers to start their two-month moneymaking journey. Most of them are rural residents who don't have farms and don't enjoy a stable income.

The journey is full of hardship and struggle. Like the Spring Festival travel peak, major stations dispatch charter trains, though many farmers are still unable to find a seat and have to find space in the aisles and even the overhead cabins.

After more than 60 hours on a slow-speed train traveling 3,000 kilometers, the trains finally reach their destinations around Xinjiang, including Turpan and Urumqi.

Working 14 hours a day, most cotton pickers can make about 10,000 yuan ($1,638) in these two months.

Some savvy cotton pickers have settled down, rented farms and employed laborers themselves. These "landlords" can rent as much as 1,000 mu (67 hectares) of land to grow cotton.

However, this traditional job has been threatened by the adoption of machinery, as Xinjiang aims to use machinery on 80 percent of cotton farms by 2015. As a result, those cotton armies may be completely displaced within a few years.