Table 1.1

I wish to thank the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the ­Provost Office at Rowan University for granting me adjusted teaching load to work on this research.

It is not an exaggeration to state that Xinjiang plays a decisive role in China’s efforts to realize the “China Dream,”...

Xinjiang is not a typical province of China. It is huge in size, diverse in ethnic composition, and physically much closer to population centers across the border than to those in China proper. These are some of the reasons that made Xinjiang’s integration with China difficult, even after Xinjiang officially became a province of China during the Qing...

The idea of partnership assistance was initially brought forward in China as early as the 1950s and 1960s. The primary reason for the loosely structured efforts of partnership assistance during the early years of the PRC was to help improve the “underdeveloped” conditions of remote areas predominantly inhabited by ethnic minorities, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, in western China....

The assistance program in Xinjiang has been presented by the central government of China as a strategically important move in the development of the national economy and maintenance of social security and stability. Even though the program demands a tremendous...

Cadre is an ambiguous concept that is not easy to operationalize, but it is extremely important in PRC’s political, social, and economic stratification systems. Among all occupational categories in the PRC, cadres are the most privileged with...

The economic assistance to Xinjiang has been carefully crafted and staged by the PRC government, similar to the overall development of the region (Becquelin 2004). But the Chinese government’s ability to control and shape Xinjiang’s economy has always been constrained by numerous factors that are not within the government’s immediate control. One factor is the long history of...

Education is one of the institutions that are designated to receive a disproportionately large share of resources provided by the assistance program in Xinjiang since 2010. More than half (52.5 percent) of the total volume of 11.17 billion yuan provided by the assistance program in 2013 was devoted to education (Xinjiang Yearbook 2014, 109–110). The total amount of funds devoted to education...

One of the most controversial issues concerning PRC’s policies in regard to Xinjiang’s development is the imbalanced nature between stimulating the economic development on the one hand and enhancing the quality of life and well-being of local populations on the other. Studies...

Situated in the northeastern end of the Pamir Plateau, Kashgar is the most far west city of Xinjiang and consequently that of China. It is about 1,588 kilometers from the city of Urumqi and some 4,000 kilometers from Beijing. Until the 21st century, to travel through the Taklamakan Desert in southern Xinjiang, which is one of the largest deserts in the world, one had to take either the northern...

When the most recent version of the assistance program was implemented in Xinjiang in 2010, China was confidently marching toward a conceived destination that Chinese leaders and intellectuals had been dreaming of throughout the 20th century: a politically powerful and economically strong China. Among the massive numbers of obstacles along the way, the riot in Xinjiang in July 2009 was arguably...

Yuhui Li is a professor of Sociology at Rowan University in the United States. She obtained her doctoral degree in Sociology from Ohio State University. Her teaching and research areas include sociological research methods, ethnic relations, community and regional development in China, and social demography.