China’s burgeoning economic growth over the past several decades has been concentrated in the east. Western China is relatively poor and inaccessible and a large proportion of ethnic minorities reside in Tibet, Xinjiang and other western areas.
Two recent articles in The New York Times highlight China’s west. Last week, an English version of a report by Chinese lawyers and scholars was released by the International Campaign for Tibet. The report criticizes the government’s policy towards Tibet and argues that the protests in March 2008 “were rooted in legitimate grievances brought about by failed government policies – and not through a plot of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.” Beijing also plans to direct the next selection of the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
Parag Khanna, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, details China’s control over two western regions – Tibet and Xinjiang – in a special report for Prospect Magazine. China’s Final Frontier discusses how China employs military, economic and demographic means to control the areas. Mr. Khanna writes, “Both Tibet and Xinjiang have the geographic misfortune of lying either on top of resources China wants, or on the path to resources it needs.”
“China is poised to win the 21st-century version of the great game in central Asia. Many people focus on China’s neo-mercantilist quest for energy and influence in Africa, the middle east and even South America, but every superpower abroad is an empire at home. And China’s internal consolidation is the story of a multi-ethnic empire being reborn using strategies familiar from America’s westward expansion – combined with the more postmodern extension of the EU…Tibet and Xinjiang are as crucial to China’s claims to unity and sovereignty as Taiwan is: weakness from within would undermine its global power projection.”
Photo from The New York Times.
