Hohhot
China's Dairy Capital (Mengniu + Yili = 14% of national dairy revenue) in a region holding 84% of China's rare earth reserves — processing grassland and minerals for the national economy.
Hohhot is the 'Dairy Capital of China' — home to both Mengniu and Yili, the nation's two largest dairy companies, which together account for 14% of China's dairy processing revenues — in a region where Mongolian herders have been fermenting mare's milk for millennia. The capital of Inner Mongolia at 3.4 million people sits at the nexus of two economies that rarely appear in the same sentence: industrial dairy processing and rare earth minerals.
Hohhot, Baotou, and Ordos together produce over 60% of Inner Mongolia's industrial output, and the regional GDP of ¥2.3 trillion makes Inner Mongolia's per capita GDP the 8th highest among China's 31 provinces. Beyond its role as a regional capital, Hohhot is the administrative gateway to China's most strategically concentrated resource base. Baotou, 150 kilometres west, holds 83.
7% of China's rare earth reserves and 37.8% of the world's — the Bayan Obo deposit alone anchors China's dominance in the materials that power electric motors, wind turbines, and military technology. Seven of China's top ten magnetic material companies operate from Baotou. Hohhot itself processes the other strategic commodity: food. The grasslands that sustained Mongolian nomadic civilisation now feed industrial dairy operations whose products reach every Chinese supermarket.
Inner Mongolia's demographic story is the subtext: Han Chinese are the overwhelming majority, with Mongolian speakers constituting a significant minority of over 4 million — the largest Mongolian population in the world, larger than the country of Mongolia itself. Street signs and public transport announcements are bilingual, but the economic integration follows Han settlement patterns established under Qing and CCP policy. The biological parallel is the rumen of a cow: a specialised digestive chamber that converts grassland biomass into a product (milk, meat) consumable by the larger organism.
Hohhot functions as the rumen of China's northern economy — processing raw materials (grass into dairy, ore into rare earth magnets) through specialised industrial ecology and delivering the refined output to the national body.