To Quell Unrest, Beijing Moves to Scatter Uighurs Across China - NYTimes.com - 3 views
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As a winter chill settled across China’s far northwest, 489 people boarded a chartered train in the city of Urumqi for the 50-hour ride to the country’s opposite corner, in semitropical Guangdong Province, to take up new factory jobs.
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With violence upending the social order in sections of Xinjiang, where resistance to Beijing’s rule has been growing among ethnic Uighurs, officials there and elsewhere in China are pushing new measures — like chartering entire trains — to bring Uighurs and members of other ethnic minorities to parts of the country where the Han, the nation’s ruling ethnicity, are the majority.
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Assimilation is only one element of the party’s strategy to quell ethnic unrest in Xinjiang. Security forces there have arrested large numbers of Uighurs, saying some are terrorists, and courts have issued death sentences.
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Since the Communist takeover of the region in 1949, the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in China, have gotten a lot of religious and cultural persecution by Han Chinese. Similar to convicted communists during The Red Scare, Uyghurs have been prosecuted under false circumstances for separatist activities. While this isn't necessarily a dispute over territory, it's certainly an ethnic conflict and because of these hostilities, Uyghurs have a hard time finding migrant work within China. How does this relate to other ethnic conflicts like in Russia or Palestine?
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I agree with Alexander about the similarity to Native Americans. Not only is China helping these people with jobs, but they are also making them go through the training programs which includes learning Mandarin, to the point where the minorities are in fear of losing their own identities. The Native Americans were forced to go through similar programs in order to "help them".
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One of the cities that we will be traveling to in China is Xian. This city has a large Muslim minority. Do ethnic groups form enclaves as a refuge?