Social Policies and Ethnic Conflict in China

The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is located in the heart of the Eurasian continent in the north-west of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the largest provincial area of the country. It occupies one-sixth of the country’s territory at approximately 1,664,900 square kilometres and is the host to 10.5% of China’s minority population (Sautman 1998: 2). It also possesses the largest land frontier, bordering Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, Russia and India, a quarter of China’s entire boundary length. Thus, since Xinjiang was integrated into China in the 1880s, the region has been growing increasingly important with regard to China’s security and economic policies (Blank 2003: 127–137; Israeli 2010: 90). The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) maintains large ground and air forces and most of its nuclear ballistic missiles in Xinjiang (George et al. 1998: 217).

Those who participated in the 7/5 riots may have done so for a number of reasons: to gain publicity for their causes; to embarrass the Chinese government in the run-up to China’s 60th anniversary; to induce Han re-migration out of Xinjiang; to segregate neighbourhoods and workplaces in the regional capital; or to create irremediable hostility between Uygurs and Han (Sautman 2010: 109). In response to the 7/5 riots, the Chinese government held a meeting¹ in the middle of May 2010 dedicated to discussing the situation in Xinjiang. This was the first time the central government had convened this kind of meeting. A new round of the Partner Assistance Programme (PAP) was then launched as a consequence of this meeting. In this chapter, we will examine in detail the policies contained in the PAP, which include a package of policies in relation to the region’s economic development, education, labour transmission, the Han officials exchange programme and policies dedicated to increasing security in the region following the period of political unrest.

After introducing our research questions, fieldwork and analysis methods in the following chapters, we will analyse our data to address the research questions discussed in the Introduction. In this chapter, we will examine the construction of Xinjiang’s problems by addressing how Han officials at different levels perceive the significance of Xinjiang to China, and the problems in Xinjiang. As SKAD suggests, these questions will be addressed by the construction of participants’ “interpretative frames’ (such as Xinjiang’s significance to China’s economy, energy, military and political securities), “classifications’ of problems (such as Xinjiang’s social, economic and “separatist’ problems, and, more importantly, the problems of communist officials) and the “phenomenal structures’ of their discourses (such as causal relations between economic development and Xinjiang’s problems, the responsibilities of various actors and how officials should act concerning Xinjiang’s problems and so on).

Following our discussion about the problems of Xinjiang in Chapter 3, in this chapter we will examine how the Chinese government is to tackle them. To use SKAD’s terminology, this is an examination of the infrastructural and organizational changes of discourse production after the 5 July riots in Xinjiang (Keller 2011: 56). In this chapter, we will explore the infrastructures of implementation that emerged out of the PAP, how the policies contained in the PAP were designed to tackle “problems” in Xinjiang. This will enable us to examine, following James Ferguson (1990), how the instrumental effects produced by the practices of officials in particular, and the unintended consequences of previous policies in Xinjiang in general are in the service of state power. That is, how the failures of previous programmes actually facilitated China’s authority to re-responsibilize its internal infrastructure, build a new shared identity among communist officials, securitize society, tighten control on religion and create more economic development opportunities in Xinjiang. In this case, the failure of previous programmes is construed as further proof of the need to reinforce and extend the power of the state (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 196) in Xinjiang. This is an example of what Carol Bacchi calls the productive role of government in shaping “problems” (2009: 2). Beyond Ferguson’s suggestions, there is also a case that securitization in Xinjiang is more like a politicization of social problems that enables China to take extreme measures to crack down not only on violent “terrorists”, but also “dissidents”.

Having discussed the problematization of Xinjiang in Chapter 3 and apparatuses that emerged from the PAP in Chapter 4, in this chapter we will first address the institutional foundation of the Communist Party in discourse making, that is “the total of all material, practical, personal, cognitive, and normative infrastructure of discourse production” (Keller 2011: 56). We do this in order to understand and analysis how the Communist Party produces discourses and how power relations evolve within this system. From an organizational prospective, the Communist Party is seen as a fragmented authority because of its complex settings between the centre and the locales, and among various departments (Lieberthal and Oksenberg 1990; Unger 2002). Thus, studies found that communist officials have many “resources for resistance” and can frequently turn central mandates in favour of their own ends (O’Brien and Li 1999: 168). Unlike their approach, in this chapter we will analyse the Communist Party from the standpoint of power relations (through our focus on key individuals), rather than analysing power relations from the standpoint of institutions (Foucault 2002: 343). This is because fundamental points of anchorage between relationships must be found outside the institution; otherwise one would have to seek the explanation and the origin of power relations within the institution, by which one is led to a reproductive deciphering of mechanism functions.

In this chapter, we will bring together and examine a number of themes explored in the analysis chapters, which include the construction of Xinjiang’s problems, apparatuses generated after the PAP, and the effects of discourse making within the communist system. By taking metaphors from Foucault’s study of the abnormal, we will show that the construction of Xinjiang’s problems is actually the process of diagnosing the “serious diseases of the child” through advocating the importance of the “child” together with a critique of the “irresponsible parents” who are unable to look after the “child”. Thus after the 7/5 riots, to cure the diseases of the “child”, the central government has taken measures to ensure unification, not only in relation to its minority population, but also towards its communist officials who are the instruments of the Communist Party in governing Xinjiang. However, as we will demonstrate, the construction of Xinjiang’s problems and associated practices are seriously challenged within the Party, since there are many problems within the process of discourse building, circulating and implementation at different levels. As will be argued, the seemingly monolithic Communist Party in fact contains numerous forms of competitions for and contestations of power. As a result, unintended consequences generated by official policies can be largely attributed to the prevalence of resistance and discretion amongst officials within the multilayered communist system.

In this chapter, we will conclude this study by briefly reviewing the research questions we have addressed, the methodology we have chosen and the results that this study has achieved. We will illustrate what contributions this study may have made, and what implications can be drawn for future studies.