Way out west: managing Chinas 'colonial' frontier

Western China covers one municipality: Chongqing; six provinces: Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Shaanxi, Gansu and Qinghai; and four autonomous regions: Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Tibet and Xinjiang. This chapter focuses primarily on the last of these two neighbouring autonomous regions, which form the westernmost parts of China and comprise substantial ethnic minority groups, respectively Tibetans and the Uyghur people. These two regions cover several million square kilometres, the southern half of which comprises the Tibetan Plateau. This is a remote and largely undeveloped part of China, increasingly out of bounds for Western observers, but with particular rural development issues that have been reported both by Chinese academics and also in Western media. The latter has given an increasing focus to the Uyghurs and the alleged forced removal of thousands from towns and villages in Xinjiang. This chapter focuses on the increasing impact of the in-migration of Han Chinese from other parts of China as part of a process of economic development in the two regions. In some quarters this has been viewed as a social and economic ‘colonisation’ of areas traditionally dominated by other ethnic groups. The tensions with these ethnic groups have been increasingly apparent in the last two decades, culminating in the world’s attention on the treatment of the Uyghurs. The chapter highlights key features of the rural development process and its emphasis on ‘modernising’ rural society, improving infrastructure and better integrating the two regions into the Chinese mainstream. For Tibet it draws upon the work of Mervyn Goldstein and for Xinjiang that of Sarah Tynen, alongside research by various Chinese authors. For Xinjiang, there is discussion of the role in rural development of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), which controls around one-third of the region’s cultivated land. Credited with founding several new cities, the XPCC has also helped increase the output of cotton but has been implicated recently in the imprisonment of Uyghurs. The region relies heavily on budget transfers from Beijing, but has increasingly seen major new infrastructure projects, especially in the most physically well-endowed area of the Tianshan belt. Xinjiang has been designated as a core region in Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, and so should continue to be the recipient of investment from central government. Tibet has also been the recipient of substantial investment from Beijing. This has helped improve its connectivity with the rest of China, symbolised by the ongoing construction of the railway being built from Chengdu to Lhasa. Although Goldstein’s work in rural Tibet is now over ten years old, he observed the dramatic changes occurring as major external investment affected parts of the Tibetan countryside as part of the ‘Open up the West’ campaign launched in 2000. He reported on the creation of new rural settlements, concluding that the rural inhabitants of Tibet were being increasingly incorporated into the market economy and experiencing greater material wealth. Education had introduced new ideas and a gradual assimilation into a wider Chinese culture, though without entirely wiping out old traditions and religion. Writing in the second half of the 2000s, he noted the juxtaposition of the old and the new, with the countryside still dominated by the Tibetans, whereas the capital, Lhasa, was experiencing an influx of Han Chinese. In some parts of the region where nomadism was the traditional way of life, new permanent settlements had been built but had not entirely displaced nomadic herding. Elsewhere, the transition from old ways of life to the new Chinese model was uneven and erratic, with a mixture of acceptance and resignation, and both winners and losers as the new economic model bedded in.