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Uyghur Entrepreneur Fights Prejudice One Nut Cake at a Time

Uyghur Entrepreneur Fights Prejudice One Nut Cake at a Time

Sixth Tone, 24 November 2016

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By Zhang Liping — It isn’t easy to succeed in business as an ethnic minority in China, especially when your product comes with its own cultural baggage. But for Adili Maimaititure, a 25-year-old Muslim Uyghur man, traditional pastries have proven to be not only a profitable enterprise, but also an opportunity to counter negative stereotypes about his people.

“Uyghurs still have a poor reputation among Han Chinese,” says Adili, the latter referring to the ethnic group that encompasses more than 90 percent of Chinese people. “I sometimes feel a sense of rejection when doing business with others,” he adds.

Adili’s company produces and markets nut cake, a traditional confection made from raisins, almonds, cashews, and walnuts. The cake is sometimes known by its Turkic name, “baklava,” though it doesn’t include phyllo dough as in the Middle Eastern versions. In Mandarin, it’s called “marentang,” meaning “cashew candy” — or “qiegao,” meaning “cut cake,” for the way it’s sliced from a block. Adili had helped his father and grandfather make nut cakes as a child in Shache County — also known as Yarkant County — in Kashgar Prefecture, part of northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where his family would sell the cakes from their stall at a weekly market.

Though his father eventually gave up the nut cake business to open a kebab restaurant, Adili returned to the confectionary trade while studying at a university in Changsha, in the central Chinese province of Hunan, where he now lives. However, his version is a fresh take on the family business, on a much greater scale.

Since launching in 2012, Adili’s company, “Nut Cake Prince,” has grown rapidly from a startup run by three university students out of a rented apartment to a business with almost 180 full-time employees: around 100 staff at the head office in Changsha and 80 working at a production base in Ningxiang County, 40 kilometers to the northwest. The company forecasts that its annual sales will reach 100 million yuan (around $14.5 million) this year.

How did we [Uyghurs] become branded as thieves and crooks out here? I think our reputation was damaged by a few unscrupulous businesspeople.

“The business is my proudest achievement,” Adili says. “I want to keep doing it long into the future and sell even more high-quality delicacies from Xinjiang.”

However, though nut cake is popular in China, it also carries a loaded history associated with ethnic conflict.

Part of the issue can be traced back to the way nut cake has been sold in the past. Typically, the cakes were made by small family businesses and peddled by Uyghur street vendors, meaning that there was little standardization of quality, taste, and pricing. Though the cost of production would usually fall between 10 and 25 yuan per kilogram, prices were often set as high as 200 yuan per kilogram, leading to disputes between Uyghur sellers and Han Chinese buyers.

Tensions flared after one widely reported incident in December 2012, when a Xinjiang Uyghur vendor and a Hunan villager brawled over the price of nut cake in Yueyang City, northeastern Hunan. According to police reports, two people were injured, several motorbikes were damaged, and nut cake worth about 160,000 yuan was destroyed in the fight. The 16 Uyghur sellers involved were compensated before being sent back to Xinjiang, drawing outrage from Han netizens who felt police had favored the Uyghurs by reimbursing them at the inflated rates.

Police later issued a clarification, saying that the compensation amounted to 96,600 yuan for 2,760 kilograms of nut cake, which valued the nut cake at a more reasonable 35 yuan per kilogram, but the damage had already been done: The high-profile incident has caused many Han Chinese consumers to associate nut cakes with the offensive stereotype of Uyghur businesspeople as swindlers and thugs.

It was around the time of the incident that Adili began to explore ways to turn his own family’s nut cake tradition into a profitable business venture.

While his older brother had remained in Xinjiang to help with the family restaurant, Adili had set his sights on university and a more stable career. He enrolled at Changsha University of Science & Technology in 2010, assisted by government affirmative action policies that entitle ethnic minorities to tuition-free education. China has 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, and most of the non-Han population is concentrated in the far reaches of the country.

Adili was in his second year of university when the case of the nut cake overpricing made headlines in Hunan. The incident brought the young Uyghur man unwanted scrutiny from some of his classmates, who already scorned him because his ethnic minority status allowed him to study on the government dime.

His peers’ reactions left Adili bewildered. “Visitors to Xinjiang often regard us as warmhearted people and good dancers,” he says. “How did we become branded as thieves and crooks out here? I think our reputation was damaged by a few unscrupulous businesspeople.”

It was then that Adili decided to start selling nut cakes himself, but at a lower price than usual. “I just wanted to prove that we Uyghurs can be honest as well,” he recalls.

Just before Adili began looking for a tricycle to set up a street stall like his father had, one of his Han Chinese roommates, Jiang Jinya, suggested he try selling the cakes on e-commerce platform Taobao instead.

Jiang pointed out that an internet search for “nut cake” yielded 200,000 results, yet nobody was selling the confection online, which indicated an untapped business opportunity. The two men agreed to pursue the idea, raising 30,000 yuan to open an online store on Taobao. Soon, a third partner, Jiang Chunyang — who isn’t related to Jiang Jinya — joined their team and helped to redesign the online shop.

At first, the business partners purchased nut cakes from other vendors, only to find that the flavor of the cakes didn’t rate highly among customers. They then decided to make the nut cakes themselves, investing in new cooking utensils and renting an inexpensive apartment near the university to use as their kitchen and business base.

It took time to get the product right. The team’s initial efforts at producing the standard square-shaped nut cake fell flat. It wasn’t until they hit on the idea of marketing round, bite-sized, individually wrapped pieces of nut cake that their business really began to take off.

Since the launch of the new bite-sized product in August, sales revenue from the company’s online store on social media app WeChat surged from 500,000 to 2 million yuan a month. In the past, nut cake only constituted a niche craft food business, but Nut Cake Prince has introduced mass production techniques to meet the rising demand from online customers.

With subsidies from the Changsha government, the team have now moved their head office to a bigger apartment building tailor-made for university entrepreneurs. Changsha University of Science & Technology is also known for promoting entrepreneurship. “The university was very supportive,” Adili says. “Our teachers provided us with a lot of advice on branding and organized volunteers to help with the relocation.”

Adili has to work harder and be more conscientious than others, because most of his customers are Han people.

The company has thrived because of its savvy use of media, including social media, to generate publicity and its innovative products that cater to contemporary consumers. Instead of offering hand-cut cake pieces sold by weight, Nut Cake Prince sells 100-gram portions for as low as 9.9 yuan each and has also developed heart-shaped nut cakes that are popular as birthday gifts. The brand was featured on the hugely popular television show “A Bite of China” in May 2014, after which the company received around 6,000 orders worth a total of 250,000 yuan in just two days.

The internet has been vital to Nut Cake Prince’s business model. “The internet prompted us to start the business and expand to the national market quickly,” Adili says. “Without the internet, our company could not survive.”

Adili has been profiled by state media several times as a role model for other ethnic minority entrepreneurs. But despite the company being highlighted as an exemplar of interethnic harmony, Adili’s friend and business partner Jiang Chunyang says prejudice remains.

“Due to the lack of understanding between Han and Uyghurs, Adili has to work harder and be more conscientious than others, because most of his customers are Han people,” Jiang tells Sixth Tone.

Even the brand’s customers and supporters sometimes harbor the expectation that Uyghurs should conform to the norms and mindset of the Han majority if they want to succeed. Publicity can be a double-edged sword, as Adili recently discovered when he became entangled in a controversy over a division of e-commerce giant Alibaba, which owns the Taobao platform.

Alitrip, Alibaba’s travel portal, announced on Oct. 28 that it had changed its name to “Fliggy,” or “feizhu” in Chinese, meaning “flying pig.”

Adili, a frequent user of the travel website, expressed his concerns about the name change on microblogging platform Weibo — where he has nearly 218,000 followers — pointing out that pigs are offensive to Muslims for religious reasons. “As a multinational company, Alibaba should reconsider this,” Adili wrote. Net users reacted swiftly, accusing him of being overly sensitive. Adili later apologized and removed his original comments.

Still, while some investors have been cautious about investing in a Uyghur-run company that sells traditional products from Xinjiang, others have jumped at the chance to get a slice of the action.

In September, Nut Cake Prince received 15 million yuan from a venture capital firm, and Adili is aiming for the company to list on the stock market within four years.

Adili says the business environment for Uyghur entrepreneurs in Xinjiang is not as developed as in other parts of the country, and local skills still lag behind those of peers in other areas, a reality he attributes to “cultural differences.”

“I think the new generation [of Uyghurs] like me should go out and get a better education so we can catch up with the rest of China,” he says.

(Header image: Adili Maimaititure, his business partners, and guests cut a giant nut cake during a promotional event in Changsha, Hunan province, Jan. 3, 2015. He Wenbing/VCG)

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