China plans to inject nearly US$1.5 billion into a western region where riots killed nearly 200 people last year, boosting its economy in hopes of reducing ethnic tension.
Various regions across Xinjiang, including 82 cities and towns, will receive investment from 19 provinces and municipalities around China over the next year to help improve housing, employment and education opportunities under the plan, the state-owned China Daily newspaper reported yesterday.
The plan aims to increase living standards, build the region into a “moderately well-off society” and maintain long-term stability, the newspaper said, citing a report in Outlook magazine, a publication of Xinhua news agency.
Experts say the plan, if carried out successfully, will aim to quell social unrest in the region.
“Improving Xinjiang’s economy is the only way the government can stabilize the region, not by guns or increased security,” said Hu Zhaoliang, a professor of regional development at Peking University, who has researched the region.
“By helping locals with language barriers and giving them better opportunities, the resentment will slowly wane,” Hu said.
Ethnic tensions in China’s far-western region have simmered since the riots last July, which also wounded nearly 1,600 people.
China’s worst ethnic violence in decades began when Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority ethnic group, clashed with police during a protest in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi.
The Uighurs see Xinjiang as their homeland and resent the Han Chinese who have moved into the region in recent decades. A simmering separatist campaign has occasionally boiled over into violence in the past 20 years.
The government says it has already poured billions of dollars into the area and substantially raised living standards there.
China blames the rioting on overseas-based groups agitating for greater Uighur rights in Xinjiang, but has presented no direct evidence.
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