Xinjiang in western China is a province rich in natural resources - a fact not unconnected with the unrest in which 140 people have died in the past few days. The region’s oil and gas riches have been a growing source of tension between the province’s original Uighur residents and the mostly Han migrants from the east, who now make up the majority of the population.

Last year the FT’s Jamil Anderlini visited the region and described the desert surrounding the city “punctuated every kilometre or two by oil and gas derricks, each of them topped with the red Chinese national flag, an assertion of sovereignty over every inch of the energy-rich ground”.

One resident described how the state’s attitude to cultural and religious freedom changed with the oil boom:

“The Chinese didn’t want to let Xinjiang be independent before, but after they built all the oilfields, it became absolutely impossible,” said one Muslim resident in Korla, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution by government security agents.

Xinjiang is the site of an important junction in a pipeline running through Kazakhstan, where Chinese oil companies own stakes in several oil producers, and which has just been extended to reach the Caspian Sea.

Xianjing also contains China’s biggest natural gas reserves, and a 4,000km gas pipeline connects Xianjing to Shanghai.

It’s not just energy: migrants have also moved there to work on large state-owned farms that make the province China’s biggest producer of cotton and tomatoes. Conflict has arisen over land rights, water rights (cotton is a thirsty crop) and the distribution of jobs between Han and Uighur.

While some of the original residents have benefited from the economic boom that has taken place there, Sarah McDowall of IHS Global Insight says government campaigns to ‘open up the West’ of the country has been successful, to some extent, and made the region relatively prosperous. But, she says:

“…It’s a question of how the benefits of these profits have been distributed among the region… the Han tend to be a lot wealthier.”

The latest violence indicates this has not been enough to smooth relations between the groups.

Xinjiang oil boom fuels Uighur resentment (FT, 28/08/2008)
Separatism stirs on China’s forgotten frontier (FT, 17/08/2008)

July 6, 2009 12:05pm in Politics | Comment