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URUMQI, Xinjiang, China – For a country of 1.3 billion – it should come as no surprise that China has at least 56 different officially recognized ethnic groups. But the largest ethnic group, the Han Chinese, are not just the majority – they dominate by a large margin and make up 91.5 percent of the population or approximately 1.2 billion people.
And as the Han Chinese footprint spreads across the country, some groups like the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic Muslim minority of about 8 million who live predominantly in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, are feeling increasingly marginalized. (See a great New York Times Interactive map of ethnic minorities in China).
Walk down the street in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang Autonomous Region, and you might mistake it for any other Chinese provincial capital. With its ugly cement boxy buildings, wide roads with maniac taxi drivers, cheap stores selling fake Nike products and DVDs, and construction sites everywhere – it looks like any other Chinese city. That is if you took away the Uighur women in their bright traditional veils and the Turkic-looking language on shops and road signs.
But it was also the site of violent clashes between Han Chinese and Uighurs in July 2009 that left almost 200 dead, the vast majority of whom them Han Chinese.
Similar clashes between Han Chinese and Uighurs happened at the end of July in Kashgar, a city at the far western tip of Xinjiang. At least eleven people were killed and dozens more injured.
The Chinese government blamed “separatist forces,” and claimed the troublemakers received training in Pakistan. But as usual, news coverage of the incidents was tightly controlled by the government.
Is Han influence all bad?
Despite the recent clashes and the assumption that the Uighurs don’t care for the Chinese incursion into their territory, it is worth asking if the Han’s presence in the area is all bad.
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Beijing, via the Xinjiang Development and Reform Committee, invested $12.3 billion dollars in key projects in the Xinjiang region during the first half of 2011 alone – a 44 percent jump from the same period last year, according to the China Business Times.
Bo Gu / NBC News
Three young Uighur girls play poker together in Kashgar’s old residential area, now a tourist attraction.
The cash-infused projects include hydropower stations in Hotan, a high voltage power grid between the Turpan and Bayingol regions, a thermoelectric plant in Usu, many new highway links connecting cities, and thousands of civil construction projects like kindergartens and residential buildings.
For the past six decades, the Chinese government has been applying the same strategy to Xinjiang as it has to Tibet – putting a lot of money and people in the region.
China’s sixth national census conducted in late 2010 shows that 40.1 percent of Xinjiang’s population is ethnic Han – compare that to 1953, when the Han population was merely 6.8 percent.
Since the 1950s, Xinjiang’s GDP has been steadily growing at an annual rate of 8 percent. In 2008, contribution to economic growth by industrial enterprises was 52.3 percent, 274 times more than what it was in 1952, according to a report titled, “Xinjiang’s Development and Progress,” released by the State Council in September 2009.
Hundreds of dams have been built and millions of miles of roads have been paved. Airports are everywhere, greatly enabling people’s speed of travel. Tourism has blossomed, and the illiteracy rate has dropped.
A Silk Road culture pushed to the brink
During the period from 1950 to 2008, direct investment from the central government in Xinjiang added up to $60 billion. Since 2000, when the government launched its grand strategy to “develop the West,” financial aid to Xinjiang has grown at a rate of 24.4 percent annually. In 2008 alone, the central government’s financial aid to the province reached $11 billion.
It is probably hard to say whether Xinjiang would be better off without the Han authorities. What really scares all the ethnicities is that they fear the recent attacks in Kashgar won’t be the last.
Many Han migrants in Xinjiang (and in Tibet) don’t understand why the violence happens, especially against them. “We’ve invested so much to help you, why do you revenge by killing us?” is a question often asked.
But not every Uighur is ungrateful. Many of them are very open to Han culture.
With many questions on my mind, I interviewed Elham a 24-year old Uighur man living in northern Xinjiang who spoke candidly on the condition of anonymity. While he represents just one viewpoint on inter-ethnic relations in the area, his responses are interesting. Here is an excerpt of our dialogue.
Q: I know that you went to a Han school when you were young. Why did you choose to go to a Han school instead of a Uighur school? Don’t you think it’s a pity that you didn’t learn your own language?
Elham: It was my decision, because I wanted to learn Chinese, because I thought it would be useful. A lot of useful literature was written in Chinese only. There were only three or four Uighur kids in my class. The Uighur language was not taught in my school. I only started to learn how to write in Uighur a few years ago. Now I’m kind of struggling…but I don’t think it’s a pity.
Q: What was it like when you went to school with all the Han children? Did you get along?