This was also made worse by dictated priorities from a distant centre with no local say in production choices. The imposition of cotton quotas in Xinjiang, or those of wheat in place of traditional Tibetan mountain barley had disastrous consequences. As economic distress deepened, local resentment found vent in the increasing incidence of sporadic violence. It is not surprising thus that order and stability in the peripheral region has ranked high in the calculus of policymakers. This became even more acute as growing uneven regional development further magnified its remoteness from China’s booming east. The officially-sanctioned “stepladder theory”, which held that growth would in time shift from the coastal regions to the hinterland came to be seen as dangerously out of step with political stability. The “worst-case scenario” was of “China fragmenting like Yugoslavia” in a perilous mix of ethnic ferment and regional disparities.

The Western Development Strategy unveiled in the ’90s sought to make amends; and has national unity as a strong subtext. This concern was more-than-evident in how the definition of the “western region” was stretched to include the ethnic autonomous regions of Guangxi and Inner Mongolia in the reorientation. The course correction was no less dictated by the fact that it holds nearly 85 per cent of the country’s most valuable mineral reserves, including natural gas, petroleum and coal.

The mainstream discourse on assimilation has also had alienating cultural connotations for minority communities. This is clear from the linguistic, religious, educational policies that are part of the development strategy. A deeply embedded sense of cultural superiority projected the Chinese as forming a superior civilisational core in the midst of “barbarian” peoples. The official metaphoric lexicon is replete with how internal barbarians need to be “slowly cooked, assimilating them to Chinese ways, adopting Chinese characteristics.” In Xinjiang, for instance, the medium of instruction was changed to Chinese at the primary-school level and language-training in Uighur was discontinued at the higher educational levels. The decision was justified in progressive terms so that “the quality of the Uighur youth will not be poorer than that of their Han peers”. Official disdain for local resentment was echoed in the words of a Party official: “The whole world is learning English. Why bother?” Minority languages were seen as having “very small capacities” and “out of step with the 21st century.”

... contd.