Page 117 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

106 Michael Dillon
foreign investment was first permitted, beginning with Shenzhen, were in the
south and Southeast of China, coastal areas that had already benefited from
development during the Treaty Port era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The economic development of these areas in the provinces of
Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang and the city of Shanghai became the phenomenon
of the 1980s and 1990s. As capital moved to these areas, so did labour, and China
experienced a migration of population unlike any it had seen for over a century.
In contrast, poor and underdeveloped areas in the west suffered even more from
a lack of investment.
The decision to tackle the problem of the relative underdevelopment in the
whole of China’s western provinces led to the policy of the Great Development of
the Western Regions (Xibu da kaifa) which was launched in 2000 in Chengdu, the
capital of Sichuan province. The Western Development policy was targeted at the
whole of the west, not just Xinjiang and this includes Ningxia, Gansu and
Qinghai. The choice of provinces and regions to be included is somewhat contro-
versial as it includes relatively prosperous localities such as Sichuan province in
addition to genuinely impoverished areas, and the strategy requires considerable
investment from abroad if it is to succeed.
The economy of the west of China is clearly in desperate need of development
although improvements in the infrastructure, primarily road and rail links and
urban construction have taken place over the last ten years. However the devel-
opment plan treats the west as one homogeneous region and does not take into
account its ethnic and religious diversity: this is likely to lead to conflict if it
appears that economic development will benefit one group (i.e. the Han) rather
than others.

Ethnic and religious conflict in the 1990s

Throughout the 1990s, political violence gradually spread throughout the region,
partly evolving out of the internal dynamics of Xinjiang’s political, social and
ethnic structure and partly in response to the cataclysmic break up of the Soviet
Union and the formation of new states by the predominantly Turkic peoples
across the border from Xinjiang. As the decade progressed, the conflict became
more acute and better organised.
The crucial events which determined the region’s slide into conflict and violence
were the riots of April 1990 at the height of the spring ploughing season at Baren
in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in southern Xinjiang. Baren is
some 50 kilometres to the south-west of the great trading centre of Kashghar, it
borders the Kashghar counties of Shufu, Shule and Yengihisar (Yingjisha) and is
close to the Pamir mountain range which forms China’s border with Afghanistan.
A group of men attending prayers at a mosque on 5 April began criticising CCP
policies towards ethnic minorities, including regulations on birth control, nuclear
weapons testing at Lop Nur, and the export of Xinjiang’s resources to ‘inland
China’. This developed into a mass protest with some activists calling for a jihad
to drive the Han non-believers out of Xinjiang and to establish an East Turkistan