| | Now that the Xinjiang paper (and its accompanying research) is done and gone, there's a couple things I'd like to add to the previous entries.
Regarding the question: "will Han migration eventually swamp the indigenous Uyghur population in Xinjiang?", I would answer, "It's impossible to say". I'm not a demographer, but it does seem that since the process of liberalizing China's migratory reglation regime was begun, the rate of migration of Han Chinese to Xinjiang (and their accompanying share of the population) has held relatively steady. That, of course, is not in and of itself an answer. Any meaningful answer to the question would be enormously complex, having to take into account things like whether the central government can successfully develop those provinces that serve as the main feeders for Han migration into Xinjiang (Sichuan, Gansu, and Henan are the biggest offenders), whether its strategy of developing Xinjiang is successful, if it is successful, who will end up getting the jobs (Uyghur, Han, or both?), whether some kind of social order can be maintained in the province (which is itself dependent on a number of things, including not least the economic situation and inmigration, as well as things like Pan-Islamic and Pan-Turkish influences. Also, as a side note, I refuse to call Xinjiang an "autonomous region". If it were, I would call it as such, but it's not, so I won't), etc., etc., etc..
I said I'm not a demographer (I'm not, I swear), but even if I were, I would have a tough time figuring out, ceterus peribus, which way things are going to break in Xinjiang, which, after much hemming and hawing, brings me to my main point: I probably couldn't say anything for sure in such a situation, because of a simple lack of data. China keeps a fairly tight lid on research in Xinjiang, and to conduct any kind of independent research to verify the claims of the concerned parties is nigh on impossible. Uyghurs claim they, along with Han migrants, are systematically undercounted in province censuses to paint a distored picture of the province's demography. Are they right? Hard to say (although it's hard to believe the claims of some Uyghur activists that the CCP's reported total of around 8.5 million is only half the real total). As difficult as it is for western analysts to make any kind of firm predictions about China as a whole (see for example Harry Harding's recent piece on China in Foreign Policy. A masterpiece of bet-hedging), it's even more so in Xinjiang's case. It's remote, it's tightly controlled, and to be honest, we don't have a real good idea of what the big picture is there.
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| | Posted 4/25/2007 11:13 AM - 11 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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