7 - Economic Modernization and Its Discontents

Summary

This chapter continues with the argument that the built-in tensions of the autonomous system, or centralization and ethnicization, have intensified in the reform era, fueling key sources of ethnic strife in the TAR and Xinjiang. The driving force has been the state’s developmentalism as strategies of development and integration. Here centralization is manifested in top-down developmental models, either state economy or market expansion, while ethnicization is manifested in more state aid and preferential economic policies as well as their ethnicizing consequences. In the TAR’s case, state subsidies have sustained an “affirmative action” economy, resulting in dependency and questionable viability. In Xinjiang’s case, the undoing of the socialist economy has left behind ethnic members whose ascriptive endowments disadvantage them in the marketplace, resulting in ethnically based grievances. In both cases, developmentalism has pitted local minorities against inland migrants, fueling ethnic conflict. As remedies, the state resorts to aid programs, thus intensifying central drives as well as ethnic prerogatives.