Connecting the news
The news that “China [is] to fund [the] education of ex-nationals in Gilgit-Baltistan“, in Pakistan, made me think of a “A New Shenzhen: Beijing aims to turn the remote western city of Kashgar into the country’s next big boomtown“, a story that ran a while ago in Newsweek.
If the Chinese government is sincere in its efforts to develop the Kasghar metropolitan area economically; if the government aims to create broad local, national, even international support for such socio-economic development in its Central Asian border region; and if the government hopes to create such support by this latest move to provide education for Uyghur ex-nationals in Pakistan, then I believe this move might prove to be genius.
Big ifs
Off course these are very big ifs – more so in a country like China, where economic and socio-economic development is rarely broadly carried, especially in rural areas.
These ifs will be further compounded by Uyghur suspicions of government intentions in developing the Kasghar economy. Such suspicion will be greater still across the boarder, where the Uyghur community is largely descendant from Uyghur nationalists that left China in the wake of the Kuomintang’s defeat in the mainland and the CCP’s “Liberation of the West”.
The Chinese government may find that there’s even less affinity with Chinese sovereignty over Xinjiang in neighboring diasporic communities then there is in the Uyghur community in Xinjiang, in other words.
Not cynical
But it will do no good to be cynical about these development. I truly hope that the Chinese government is sincere in its effort. For if Kasghar and the broader Central Asian region develops, this area will be all the more interesting for it.
I am looking forward to the sincere effort and the development of the region too.