WHEN he took over in 2010 as the Communist Party chief of the western province of Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian was portrayed by state media as a young, media-savvy official with a mission: to crack down hard on its separatists but also to foster “brotherly affection” between ethnic groups in the poor, violence-torn region. On August 29th Mr Zhang was moved to a new, as yet undisclosed, job, having claimed some success in his fight against Islamist “extremism”. The region’s ethnic divide, however, remains bitter.
Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic-Turkic people who make up nearly half of Xinjiang’s residents, have particular reason to grumble. Mr Zhang was sent to Xinjiang partly, officials said at the time, to improve the lot of people living in poorer, Uighur-dominated, areas (he is pictured, arm raised, meeting some of them last year). A few months earlier an explosion of rioting between Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese, who form more than 90% of China’s population, had left around 200 people dead in the provincial capital, Urumqi (see map). Officials believed that poverty and unemployment among Uighurs was fuelling unrest. Mr Zhang, however, did...Continue reading
Source: China http://ift.tt/2bGxBvV
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