Last week\u2019s attack on a popular \u00dcr\u00fcmqi market, which left forty-two dead and nearly 100 innocent shoppers injured, came the day after Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin sealed a US$400 billion, thirty-year gas deal in Shanghai. <\/p>\n
James Leibold
May 28, 2014<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s attack<\/a> on a popular \u00dcr\u00fcmqi market, which left forty-two dead and nearly 100 innocent shoppers injured, came the day after Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin sealed a US$400 billion, thirty-year gas deal<\/a> in Shanghai. \u00dcr\u00fcmqi, the capital of China\u2019s far-western Xinjiang region, now links Shanghai with Moscow via a growing network of roads, railways and pipelines, rendering it China\u2019s backdoor into Eurasia.<\/p>\n As U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan and America pivots toward Asia, China is responding with its own pirouette. Here Xinjiang is emerging as an important staging ground for new markets and energy sources in Central Asia and beyond, with the Eurasian Land Bridge freeing China from any sea-based containment strategy.<\/p>\n Yet the latest terrorist incident highlights a deep contradiction at the heart of Beijing\u2019s Xinjiang policy. The Party-state\u2019s desire to deepen economic reforms and expand global trade is antithetical to its constant drumbeat about \u201cmaintaining social stability and achieving an enduring peace\u201d in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n Chinese authorities were quick to label the \u00dcr\u00fcmqi attack, like previous ones, a \u201cviolent terrorist incident,\u201d with Xi Jinping \u201cpledging to severely punish terrorists and spare no efforts in maintaining stability.\u201d Yet the Party-state seems helpless to curb the current cycle of religious and ethnic violence. Internal government statistics speak of 248 \u201ccases of violence and terror\u201d in Xinjiang in 2013, with most of these incidents pitting China\u2019s embattled Uyghur Muslim minority against a steadily encroaching Chinese state and its Han majority.<\/p>\n In December last year, Xi Jinping delivered a major speech on Xinjiang work before the twenty-five-member Politburo in which he outlined a new \u201cgrand strategic plan\u201d for the region, according to the official Xinhua New Agency<\/a>. While the speech hasn\u2019t been made public, Xinjiang is central to Xi\u2019s entire policy agenda, with a redoubling of efforts to secure and develop the region since Xi assumed power at the 18th Party Congress in October 2012.<\/p>\n During a September 2013 speech<\/a> in the Kazakh capital of Astana, Xi Jinping called for the joint construction of a \u201cnew Silk Road economic belt,\u201d and outlined ambitious plans to increase transport, communication, trade and people-to-people links between China and Europe over the Eurasian landmass. The massive Russian gas deal is only the latest in a raft of Chinese bilateral and multilateral deals<\/a> signed with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Iran and other Central Asian and Middle Eastern states over the last couple of years.<\/p>\n China\u2019s expanding economic footprint in the region is being backed up with a more muscular diplomacy, as Xi Jinping seeks to use multilateral forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) to advance the country\u2019s interests in Eurasia.<\/p>\n General Liu Yazhou, the political commissar of the National Defense University in Beijing, once labeled Central Asia as \u201cthe thickest and richest piece of cake bestowed on today\u2019s Chinese people by heaven.” As a fellow \u201cprinceling\u201d with deep kinship and patronage ties with Xi Jinping, Liu Yazhou is rumored to be a close personal advisor. For decades, Liu and others have advocated a \u201cgo west\u201d strategy for China.<\/p>\n Here, Xinjiang is crucial. As the \u201cfulcrum\u201d of any westward pivot, the stability of Xinjiang is paramount according to Liu Yazhou, and this means finding a solution to the religious and ethnic problems that have plagued the region for centuries. In his 2001 essay entitled \u201cGrand National Strategy<\/a>,\u201d Liu outlined a three-stage shift West, which included the eventual partitioning of Xinjiang in small administrative units in order to deprive the separatists and extremists of their territorial basis. Presumably, this would be accompanied by increased Han migration, boosting further their already forty-percent share of the Xinjiang\u2019s population.<\/p>\n Since coming to power, Xi Jinping has doubled down on Xinjiang. Top Politburo officials have visited the region far more often than any other frontier region, including Tibet. According to Xinhua<\/a>, Xi personally convened seven high-level meetings and issued more than thirty directives on Xinjiang work since the 18th Party Congress.<\/p>\n The Chinese President personally toured the region in April, where he was quoted<\/a> as stating: \u201cThe long-term stability of Xinjiang is vital to the whole country’s reform, development and stability; to the country’s unity, ethnic harmony and national security as well as to the great revival of the Chinese nation.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike his predecessor\u2019s narrow focus on \u201cleapfrog development,\u201d Xi Jinping realizes money does not necessarily buy love, and instead is seeking to win the \u201chearts and minds\u201d of ordinary Uyghurs through a series of new policy measures. In March<\/a> the Xinjiang regional government started sending high-level Party cadres down to live in grassroots villages and communities, targeting the poor, Uyghur-dominated villages of southern Xinjiang.<\/p>\n These officials are tasked with \u201cconsoling\u201d the common folk through regular household visits and sympathy money, while rooting-out extremist and antistate behavior, including wearing full-face veils, \u201cbizarre clothing,\u201d sporting long beards or engaging in any of the twenty-six \u201cillegal religious activities<\/a>.\u201d This billion-U.S.-dollar campaign will rusticate 200,000 cadres over the following three years, with nearly 75,000 officials achieving \u201ccomplete grassroots coverage<\/a>\u201d this year according to Xinjiang Party boss Zhang Chunxian.<\/p>\n Naturally, this sort of \u201cimpact-integration\u201d produces a strong reaction. While most Uyghurs try their best to survive, even succeed, in a country where they often feel out of place, there is a small, yet significant, pool of individuals who have sought refuge in radical Islam. As we have witnessed elsewhere, cultural alienation and religious extremism are an incendiary mix, especially when confronted with an intrusive one-party state structure\u2014the perfect formula for heinous acts of despair like the \u00dcr\u00fcmqi attack.<\/p>\n As the Chinese Party-state pushes further and deeper into Xinjiang society, violent counterattacks are inevitable. The state\u2019s top-down, strike-first approach will only exacerbate the problem. What is needed instead is a far more gradualist, minimalist form of community building: slow but steady efforts at building trust, tolerance and mutual respect while ushering in a more equitable, democratic and inclusive form of politics.<\/p>\n Xi Jinping might have a firm grasp of the problem and its importance; yet, the Party\u2019s security imperative\u2014namely, the need to respond robustly and decisively to acts of terror in order to reassure an edgy and potentially disloyal Han majority\u2014renders its economic agenda for boosting Uyghur income and employment levels virtually impossible. On the current course, Xinjiang\u2019s Han community will monopolize any New Silk Road economic belt, while the Uyghurs remain trapped under increased surveillance and workplace discrimination.<\/p>\n Deng Xiaoping once said, \u201cIf you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in.\u201d China\u2019s solution to ongoing ethnic violence in Xinjiang lies neither in a flyswatter nor bolted windows, but rather the location and elimination of the festering sources of inequality that breed the flies of violence. Otherwise, China\u2019s westward pivot will end in \u00dcr\u00fcmqi.<\/p>\n James Leibold<\/em><\/a> is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Asian Studies at La Trobe University in Australia. He is the author of<\/em> Ethnic Policy in China: Is Reform Inevitable<\/em><\/a>? (East-West Center, 2013).<\/em><\/p>\n