The story begins in 1992, when an army unit from Lanzhou in neighbouring Gansu province, drilling with state permission, made a decent oil find in Jingbian county.

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Wind power is also being experimented with in a small way for power generation in northern and western China, where it could supply electricity to rural villages in windswept and increasingly arid Inner Mongolia and Gansu Province that are still not on the grid.

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In 2008, he was convicted by a court in the western province of Gansu, where the sarcophagus was from.

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Eager to escape Beijing, he volunteered for a post at the Liujiaxia Hydraulic Power Plant in the northwestern province of Gansu.

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