What do Mongolians do for a living?

Answer 1

Farming of crops such as wheat takes precedence along the river valleys. In the more arid grasslands, herding of goats, sheep and so on is a traditional method of subsistence. Forestry and hunting are somewhat important in the Greater Khingan ranges in the east. Reindeer herding is carried out by Evenks in the Evenk Autonomous Banner. More recently, growing grapes and winemaking have become an economic factor in the Wuhai area.

Inner Mongolia has abundance of resources especially coal, cashmere, natural gas, rare earth elements, and has more deposits of naturally-occurring niobium, zirconium and beryllium than any other province-level region in China. However in the past, the exploitation and utilisation of resources were rather inefficient, which resulted in poor returns from rich resources. Inner Mongolia is also an important coal production base in north China. It plans to double annual coal output by 2010 (from the 2005 volume of 260 million tons) to 500 million tons of coal a year.

Industry in Inner Mongolia has grown up mainly around coal, power generation, forestry-related industries, and so forth. Inner Mongolia now laid emphasis on six competitive industries, namely energy, chemicals, Metallurgy, equipment manufacturing, processing of farm (including dairy) produce as well as hi-tech products. Well-known Inner Mongolian enterprises include companies such as ERDOS, Yili, and Mengniu.

The nominal GDP of Inner Mongolia in 2008 was 776.2 billion Yuan (US$110 billion), a growth of 17.2% from 2007, with an average annual increase of 20% from the period 2003-2007. Its per capita GDP reached 32,214 yuan (US$4,638). In 2008, Inner Mongolia's primary, secondary, and tertiary industries were worth 90.7 billion yuan, 427.1 billion yuan, and 258.4 billion yuan respectively. The urban per capita disposable income and rural per capita net income were 14,431 yuan and 4,656 yuan, up 16.6% and 17.8% respectively.

As with much of China, economic growth has led to a boom in construction, including new commercial development and large apartment complexes.

As the winds in the grasslands are very strong, some private companies have set up wind parks in parts of Inner Mongolia such as Bailingmiao, Hutengliang and zhouzi.

Answer 2

The Mongolians make a living by selling goods such as milk from goats.