Xinjiang in the nineties

This article has shown the tight relationship between agricultural policies, large reclamation programs and Han migration into Xinjiang. This is not the product of chance but the result of a deliberate, albeit covert, plan by the central authorities to give new impetus to the Sinification of Xinjiang. Beijing's strategy has created a wide array of incentives for Han migrants to move into the region. Compared with the late 1980s, urban networks in Xinjiang-a key element in territorial control-are much better developed. The Han population is expanding, settling further away in towns, and has started to spread out steadily in southern Xinjiang. A restructured and rejuvenated colonizing organization, the Production and Construction Corps, has been entrusted to facilitate these aims. But there are major risks inherent in this strategy: in particular, the heightening of inter-ethnic conflicts and pressures on the environment. These twin repercussions contribute to the ethnic population's growing opposition to Beijing's policies. In southern Xinjiang particularly, a renewed repressive climate against religion, customs, and local economic and ethnic elites has generated a pattern of increased segregation. In short, for ethnic minorities the economic changes and pressures engineered from Beijing during the 1990s have led to a very major shift in relations between the state and society in Xinjiang. This shift can be analysed as a change from a discriminative system (one that discriminates in treatment or favour on the basis of nationality) to a segregative one (a system that separates and dissociates one group of people from the whole).