Reuters | Sept 26, 2000

BEIJING -- Despite a spate of bombings and a huge Chinese military presence, ethnic ties in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang are enjoying their "best period in history," a regional official said on Tuesday.

"Ethnic equality and harmony is the core of ethnic policy," Xinjiang government Vice-Chairman Zhang Zhou told a news conference. "The problem of ethnic discrimination doesn't exist," he said. Zhang, one of four Han Chinese among eight vice-chairman in the ethnically diverse region of 17.8 million people, said ethnic minorities enjoyed preferential policies in Xinjiang in family planning, education and job allocation.

Ablat Abdurishit, the Xinjiang governor, said relaxed application to minorities of China's strict population control policies meant that "minority population growth rate was higher than that of the Han." Han Chinese are the country's dominant ethnic group.

Ablat said the 6.8 million Han in Xinjiang made up 38 percent of Xinjiang's population. The 62 percent of the population which were members of 46 other ethnic groups included 10 million Uighurs and 1.3 million Kazakhs, he said.

The Xinjiang officials spoke to reporters two weeks after Premier Zhu Rongji toured the region and called for rapid economic development and a crackdown on separatists. Zhu called for the creation of a "rock-hard stronghold" in Xinjiang -- a vast, sparsely inhabited border region where China maintains a heavy military presence and encourages Han Chinese from populous eastern areas to move there.

PACIFYING PIPELINE

Uighur militants have been struggling for decades to establish an independent state they call East Turkestan in Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan, Pakistan, three former Soviet Central Asian republics, Russia and Mongolia.

Beijing has cracked down hard on the Turkic-speaking Uighurs and played a leading role in Central Asian diplomacy with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, designed to staunch separatism and religious extremism.

Xinjiang has been rocked by anti-Chinese riots, bombings and assassinations since 1996. The worst rioting left nine dead and more than 200 injured in Yining city on February 5, 1997.

In July, China executed three men it said were separatists linked to a "reactionary Muslim organisation" involved in making bombs in Xinjiang. In an indication China would offer Xinjiang carrots as well as sticks, Ablat said a proposed $4.8 billion west-east gas pipeline would tap "bountiful energy resources" and bring wealth to the poor region. The pipeline, slated for completion in 2003, would "consolidate the unity of the different ethnic groups of Xinjiang and the ethnic unity of the motherland," he said.

Industry analysts and potential foreign investors see the construction as primarily politically motivated, a way to pump much-needed capital into a region of persistent ethnic strife. Anti-government exiles have complained that the bulk of money pumped into Xinjiang would not bring jobs or other benefits for Uighurs and was designed mainly to fortify the Chinese presence.