Editor's Note: This is a three-part series on China's evolving strategic interests in Central Asia and in its own far northwest, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Part 3 examines China's core interests in limiting social instability in Xinjiang and ensuring the long-term security of its natural resources and transport infrastructure elsewhere in Central Asia — especially after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Read more in Part 1 and Part 2.
Civil unrest and militancy, whether secular political or Islamist in orientation, have been constant throughout Xinjiang's recent history, but the nature of the risk posed by unrest in the autonomous region is changing. In the 1990s and early 2000s, violence spurred by ethnic tensions between Xinjiang's majority Uighur Muslim population and Han Chinese immigrants to the region created a number of political challenges for the Communist Party. Domestically, the unrest stirred anxieties about the possibility that anti-Party and anti-Han sentiment in China's borderlands could someday coalesce into more than a minor irritant. Diplomatically, meanwhile, the turmoil in Xinjiang did not help China's efforts to portray itself as a responsible member of the international community, especially in the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989.
Throughout this period, ethnic unrest in Xinjiang failed to significantly threaten China's economic and energy security. Until recently, most of Xinjiang was undeveloped and poorly integrated with the rest of the country, and with the exception of parts of the Tarim Basin, all of the region's major oil fields were located in Han-dominated northern Xinjiang, where religiously motivated violence has been much less common. Minor violent incidents in southern areas around the energy-rich Tarim Basin, such as Hotan and Kashgar, concerned Beijing as portents of increased Islamist militancy, but their impact on business continuity was minimal.
In the future, this will not necessarily be the case. As infrastructure in Xinjiang develops, and as more of the province's oil, natural gas and coal make their way to cars, factories and power generators elsewhere in China, the stakes for maintaining security in the west will rise.
Securing the Borderlands
Particularly concerning will be a thin band of settlements surrounding the Tarim Basin in southern Xinjiang — especially Kashgar and Hotan prefectures — home to the vast majority of the province's roughly 9.5 million Uighur Muslims. Kashgar, with a total population of 3.9 million people (almost 90 percent of whom are Uighur), has long served as a base for Islamist elements in the region and has seen several attacks in recent years, including a series of militant raids in July 2011 in which at least 19 people were killed. Kashgar will likely see additional violence in the coming years as Han migration, industrialization and escalating property markets stir ethnic and civil tensions with the local population.
Seven of the 10 largest Uighur-related attacks or incidents between 2008 and 2012 took place in or around Hotan or Kashgar. The prefectures' location near China's borders with Pakistan (where the remnants of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the most well-known of the Uighur militant groups operating in Xinjiang, are reportedly based) and Tajikistan's restive Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province, make them ideal passageways into China for jihadist elements in South and Central Asia.
Southern Xinjiang's demographic balance, higher levels of poverty and history of militant activity help explain the Chinese government's intense focus on integrating the region into northern Xinjiang's transport networks. In June 2011, just weeks before 18 people in Hotan and another 19 in Kashgar were killed in militant attacks, the Kashgar-Hotan Railway opened passenger service, helping connect southern Xinjiang's major population centers to the Lanzhou-Xinjiang trunk line. In the future, Beijing will rely on such lines not only to promote economic development and integration but also to transport security forces in the event of raids, attacks or civil unrest.
Infrastructure, Economic Growth and Security
Nonetheless, in regions with histories of political unrest and high-intensity smuggling, greater connectivity tends to enhance the mobility of militant and anti-government actors as well. As the number of roads connecting Xinjiang to Central Asian states increases, it is likely that the volume of weapons and drugs trafficking in support of organized crime and jihadist networks in China will grow. This, in turn, will require an even greater government security presence in restive areas, such as those around Kashgar.
In the long run, Beijing hopes that economic development will pacify Xinjiang. Until then, however, robust growth could lead to more frequent and perhaps more intense unrest. If the 2009 riots in Han-dominated Urumqi were any indication, the influx of Han migrants into southern Xinjiang will not be met passively. That the south has historically been a hotbed for religious violence, while northern political unrest has been more secular in nature, may only exacerbate underlying ethnic tensions.
If ethnic tensions indeed rise in southern Xinjiang, the number of potential targets will be greater than ever before. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, along with the various groups often associated with it, may not have the capacity to carry out large-scale attacks against energy-related infrastructure in the Tarim Basin or Kuqa-Baicheng coal field, but assaults on transport infrastructure, organized riots and bombings with improvised explosive devices are well within the militants' capabilities. As trade increases between southern and northern Xinjiang, and as cross-border economic ties strengthen with Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and possibly Pakistan via the Kashgar-Gwadar transportation corridor, the downstream impact of such attacks will be magnified.
When Zhang Chunxian took over as Xinjiang Party Secretary in 2010, he promised a somewhat softer approach to regional stability than his predecessor, Wang Lequan, whose program Zhang called the "flexible iron-fisted rule." So far, Zhang has had difficulty following through with his promise. Violence continues in Xinjiang and appears to be increasingly targeting police and security forces. In response, Beijing has widened the scope of its definition of "terrorist" activity to encompass a broad spectrum of attacks and unrest in the region, rather than just those from jihadist groups such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.
This shift in terminology may signal a more hardline approach to maintaining security in the future. Beijing would certainly prefer conciliatory policies in restive border regions, and a softer approach may succeed in Tibet or Inner Mongolia. But for the foreseeable future, Xinjiang's newfound importance as western China's energy and transport hub will likely make a continued heavy security presence necessary — especially if regional security takes a turn for the worse after the United States exits Afghanistan.
The Afghanistan Problem and Regional Uncertainties
The U.S. withdrawal is unlikely to trigger an immediate breakdown in regional security. But a possible resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, combined with numerous internal political and security uncertainties in Central Asia, seems likely to increase volatility at least somewhat in the region — and potentially along the Chinese border.
Central Asia and Afghanistan share strong geographic and demographic links. Historically, their borders have been either fluid or nonexistent, and at various times parts of the region and Afghanistan belonged to competing empires. The "Great Game" between the Russian and British empires at the turn of the 19th century disrupted this dynamic by formally establishing Afghanistan as a buffer between Russia's Central Asian domains and British-controlled India. This divide became further entrenched in the 20th century, as 70 years of Soviet rule in Central Asia reshaped the political and cultural identities of the region. Nonetheless, the flow of people, goods and ideas between Afghanistan and Central Asia never stopped completely. In the politically destabilized wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, cross-border flows of religious ideas into Central Asia surged once again.
The rise of Islamist and other separatist movements in the mountainous, loosely administered borderlands of countries such as Tajikistan (which borders both Afghanistan and Xinjiang) and Kyrgyzstan has been a constant concern for Beijing. Now, as Chinese companies look to invest in energy and natural resource extraction in Afghanistan, they must contend not only with direct security threats to mining and transport infrastructure in these regions, but also with the impact of decades of conflict and political instability on Afghanistan's weakened, fragmented governmental and regulatory institutions — not to mention the enormous logistical challenge of getting minerals through the mountains of Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Xinjiang in a cost-effective manner. Already, two landmark Chinese-backed oil and copper projects in Afghanistan have ground to a halt due to a combination of security risks and breakdowns in negotiations with Kabul and neighboring governments.
For Beijing, these experiences do not bode well for the future of Chinese investment in Afghanistan or for regional cooperation in general. Indeed, each country in Central Asia presents distinct risks and contingencies, whether stemming from internal ethnic and regional divisions, deep-seated religious conflicts or looming succession crises. Russian interests and influence could also undermine Beijing's economic and security goals. Likewise, though new Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has struck a more accommodating note toward historically restive regions such as Balochistan (through which the Kashgar-Gwadar corridor, if built, will pass), it remains to be seen whether Islamabad can maintain security in Waziristan and other tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, let alone in the disputed Jammu-Kashmir region. If not, it will be difficult for the Kashgar-Gwadar corridor to become anything more than a single paved road.
Afghanistan has an uncanny capacity for bogging down great powers, and it did so long before it had vast natural resources to be exploited. After so many centuries of disengagement, China does not want to follow suit. Beijing will continue to invest in infrastructure, energy and mining projects in Afghanistan, in part to stem a further devolution of the country's security environment. But as China's presence there grows, and as its reliance on resources in Xinjiang and Central Asia deepens, so too will its exposure to the region's security risks and supply disruptions. This will undermine Beijing's efforts to build redundancy, and in theory stability, into its energy and resource supply chains, which was the primary goal of China's renewed focus on westward development in the first place.
