You Nuo

Unlocking Xinjiang's potential

By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-27 11:28
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The stock market reacted favorably to Beijing's decision to appoint Zhang Chunxian, former Communist Party chief of Hunan province, to head the Party in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Xinjiang, as people often say, is a complicated place to manage because of its diverse ethnic and religious relations. But contrary to the belief of those who have never had much local experience, the government's priority there should not be stability for stability's sake.

Unlocking Xinjiang's potential

Like anywhere else in China, or rather anywhere else in the developing world, whatever problem there is in Xinjiang, it won't go away unless there is development, or new wealth, and along with this, new opportunities, to be shared by the younger generation.

But for a long time, many people in China have had a rather crude, if not primitive, definition of what development should be like.

Officials in Xinjiang used to lament that, despite the region's rich energy resources, the central government had not been as generous as they thought it should have been in building large refineries and chemical plants. But to what end? It wouldn't be worthwhile, or achieve the right economy of scale, as many so-called development experts used to argue, because Xinjiang is so distant from the coastal industries that the enormous transportation costs would make nearly all its industrial products helplessly uncompetitive in Beijing or Shanghai.

If the understanding of development remains so limited, to include just large industries and nothing else, entrepreneurs from Xinjiang really couldn't do much else beyond what they have done so far.

But Zhang Chunxian should have a better idea. He has seen, and indeed has done his bit to help, a landlocked and resource-poor agricultural province like Hunan follow its own path of development.

This is an important lesson that many officials from the underdeveloped hinterlands and western regions still have to learn. Development shouldn't just mean producing and selling industrial products - such as cars and computers.

Development should mean the effective use of whatever local resources are at hand. And Xinjiang has never had a lack of them. Other than its energy resources, it boasts some of China's best resources for tourism, cultural business and crasftsmanship, top-quality organic foods, and even the environment.

According to the Chinese-language press, Zhang is expected to report on Xinjiang's new development strategy in May and about what the rest of the country can do to help make it a success.

younuo@chinadaily.com.cn