Xinjiang plans multi-ethnic settlement in rural south

In its latest move to promote ethnic integration in less-developed regions, China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is building a pilot settlement for residents from multiple ethnicities in a rural desert area outside the city of Hotan as a social experiment to facilitate cultural exchanges and curb terror activities.

Analysts have expressed their approval for the plan to build such a settlement in southern Xinjiang's Hotan, which has a Uyghur population of more than 95 percent, but cautioned that the high cost could impede the government from promoting similar settlements elsewhere.

According to the Xinjiang Daily on Sunday, the 6,700 mu, or 447 hectares, residential community, intended to help foster economic and social integration among different ethnic groups, is currently under construction in the desert outside the city of Hotan, and will be ready for residents to move in at the end of this year.

The new settlement will consist of 600 housing apartments and 600 greenhouses. Built on an area with abundant groundwater, it will provide every household with a greenhouse, a courtyard and 0.33 hectares of fruit orchard to facilitate agricultural entrepreneurialism.

Over 6,000 peasant households from minority ethnic groups and 700 Han farmers from nearby villages and townships have applied to move into the community, and will go through a selection process competing for the 600 openings. The criteria for selection have yet to be disclosed.

Multi-ethnic integration was one of the key issues at the second central work conference on Xinjiang held in Beijing in May, during which President Xi Jinping called for the region to build communities for residents of different ethnic groups will boost understanding by living, working, and studying together.

His speech came against the backdrop of rising numbers of ethnically Han residents of southern Xinjiang moving out of Uyghur neighborhoods in recent years, and vice versa.

A Xinjiang expert who has lived in a similarly mixed community believed the new settlement could help facilitate cultural exchanges and curb terror activities.

"From my experience, a mixed community like this one will greatly enhance communications between different ethnic groups, especially when they work and socialize in the same spaces," Sun Lizhou, a research fellow at Chongqing University who grew up in a mixed ethnic community for civil servants in Urumqi, told the Global Times.

This is not the first such community in Xinjiang. A similar settlement in the resource-rich city of Karamay has already achieved satisfactory results, reported Xinjiang Daily.

Sun believes the new settlement in the southern part of Hotan will serve an as a model for cross-ethnic economic cooperation in southern Xinjiang.

Hotan has seen repeated outbreaks of violence over the past years.

In 2011, 18 terrorists stormed into a local public security bureau. Their attack took the lives of four civilians and a local militaman while setting the building on fire.

"Hotan is the city in Xinjiang with the highest population of Uyghurs, proportionally speaking. That's what has made the settlement project a focus of attention," Li Xiaoxia, a professor with the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

But Li believes such settlements are not likely to spread across the whole of Xinjiang, because of the steep capital and resource requirements to build a new community in a desert area.

Others, like Turgunjan Tursun, a research fellow at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, are concerned about whether the government will have to force people to relocate.

"The public's choice in housing has become market-oriented and it has become harder for the government to plan the composition of a community's population," said Turgunjan.

"The intended effect of ethnic integration will not be seen in a short period of time. The authorities must not force the progress of reallocation," he said.