This photo taken with a mobile phone on June 15, 2025 shows a view of a traditional Chinese medicine planting cooperative in the Greater Hinggan Mountains in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. (Xinhua)

HARBIN, May 7 (Xinhua) -- In China's northernmost forest region, winter is no longer merely a season to endure. It is becoming a line of business.

Across parts of the Greater Hinggan Mountains in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, snow and ice can still linger deep into early summer. The frozen period lasts more than 200 days in some areas, long enough to make roads, power systems and industrial equipment behave differently from the way they do in milder climates.

That used to be part of the region's development problem. Now it is part of the pitch.

Local officials and companies are trying to turn one of China's coldest inhabited regions into a testing ground, supply base and ecological asset. The bet is that a place once defined by timber, long winters and remoteness can build new industries around precisely those conditions -- from extreme-weather testing and cold-region herbs to wild blueberry processing, wind-power training and ecological finance.

Finding new growth sources is not the only issue for a former logging area. It is how to accomplish this without going back to the previous strategy of increasing forest extraction.

The clearest early answer is cold-weather testing. The Greater Hinggan Mountains prefecture has attracted 11 testing companies and research institutions and built 12 extreme-cold testing bases and grounds. What began largely with automobiles has widened into eight fields, including photovoltaic equipment, new building materials and aerospace.

The commercial logic is straightforward: manufacturers and research teams need real cold to test how vehicles, power equipment, communications systems and new materials perform. That cold is abundant in the area.

More than 400 companies have used the region's testing services, according to local authorities. Each winter, over 10,000 testing personnel and technical teams arrive, filling hotels, restaurants and repair shops and creating demand for transport and maintenance. Officials say the industry has directly created thousands of jobs, helping absorb surplus labor after logging was halted in the forest region.

The value of the test grounds, in other words, lies not only in the data they help manufacturers collect, but in the winter economy that forms around them.

The same calculation is being applied to other local resources, though on a much slower clock. A portion of the new growth in the area is rooted in soil rather than ice.

Li Wei, who runs a traditional Chinese medicine planting cooperative, is waiting for that slower clock to pay off. Red peony root, one of his main crops, takes six years after planting before it can generate income. Until then, he said, the business is almost all investment.

"This August, our red peony root will finally be ready," Li said. "Years of investment are about to see a return." Subsidies, infrastructure support and tourism facilities helped make that long wait financially bearable, he said.

His cooperative plans to expand by 1,500 to 2,000 mu (100 to 133.33 hectares) this year and aims to reach 10,000 mu by 2029. It has become a provincial-level breeding base for quality traditional Chinese medicine seedlings. Annual labor demand now exceeds 20,000 person-days, while picking gardens and agritainment businesses are being added to link herb cultivation with rural tourism.

Compared to cold-weather testing, this type of growth is slower and less likely to yield rapid returns. However, the appeal for a former logging region is that it creates a longer revenue chain from the region's ecology, land, and tourism resources rather than reverting to the previous extractive model.

Wild blueberries offer another version of the same resource upgrade. The region has abundant natural berries, but the business case depends on moving them beyond raw ingredients. At Baisheng Blueberry Technology Development Co. Ltd., a livestreamer sells berry-based products from a glass room near the company's entrance, while the company uses low-temperature extraction, enzymolysis and fermentation to develop higher-value health products.

The process is incorporating research. The company, a Heilongjiang high-tech enterprise and a recognized specialized and sophisticated business, set up a provincial doctoral innovation station in 2025 with the food science school of a Harbin-based university, according to its general manager. Probiotic functional products are one area of interest.

Renewable energy presents a different version of the same challenge. The Greater Hinggan Mountains has abundant wind resources, but turning that into an industry requires more than turbines. At a local technician college, wind-turbine nacelles, hub structures and virtual-reality equipment sit inside training classrooms. The college has joined with the local vocational college and Sinovel Wind Group to build a new-energy industry college, equipped with 17 training modules and a real doubly-fed induction generator wind turbine.

Workforce capacity is the key. A region can have wind, land and policy support, but without technicians able to operate and maintain equipment, the resource remains underused.

The most unusual part of the strategy sits in finance. The Greater Hinggan Mountains is one of China's pilot areas for converting ecological products into measurable economic value, an effort aimed at a basic problem in green development: nature may have value, but lenders need something they can price.

The region has begun including the economic value of frozen reservoir surfaces in its value-of-ecological-products, or VEP, accounting system. In the second half of last year, a reservoir project obtained 5 million yuan (about 730,000 U.S. dollars) in financing by pledging ecological-product income rights, according to the local branch of the People's Bank of China.

That is what separates the experiment from a simple list of local industries. The region is not only finding uses for cold, forests, berries and wind. It is trying to make those resources legible to finance.

Luan Yunxiao, an industrial economy researcher at the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, said the region is trying to break from the old dependence on conventional resource extraction. The real test, he said, is whether ecological products can be given mechanisms that allow their value to be measured and realized.

It is the common thread behind the region's scattered-looking experiments: cold-weather testing, herbal cultivation, blueberry processing, wind-power training and VEP-backed financing. Each is a different attempt to make local conditions economically usable without returning to the old logging model.

The environment in the Greater Hinggan Mountains is still very harsh. What has changed is the way local officials and businesses are trying to read it: less as a barrier to growth than as a set of assets waiting to be priced. ■

A teacher tests virtual-reality equipment inside a training classroom at a local technician college in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, April 10, 2026. (Xinhua/Zhu Yue)