This book considers how identity informs the nature of economic participation among ethnic minority entrepreneurs in China’s remote Northwest through interviews with entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds, including Tibetan, Han and Muslim Chinese. It will be useful for students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Ethnic Studies and Economics.
In the last two decades, China's western inland region has largely been left out of the nation's economic boom. While its 355-million population accounts for 28% and its land area for 71% of China's total, the region's share of the national GDP is under 20%. Since 1999, Beijing has implemented the West China Development Program to boost the region's growth. To study the major domestic issues and the global implications of this program, the University of Victoria's Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives organized and hosted a multidisciplinary international conference on March 6?8, 2003. This volume of papers presented at the conference offers perspectives on the issues by leading experts of diversified academic disciplines from China, Canada, the US, and other countries.
From macro and micro perspectives, this book provides a panoramic view of China's sprawling western region. China's twelve western provinces are examined through several critical thematic dimensions.
This book examines failure in the urbanisation of Northwest China as a result of government industrial policies that have impacted on the economic development of the region. By looking at the under-researched provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Inner Mongolia, which make up a quarter of China's territory, Zheng and Deng challenge the common story of China's miracle growth and reveal the dark side of the country’s pursuit of modernity. Severe weather conditions, chronic drought, permanent lack of oxygen and unforgiving terrain in the Northwest make farming, manufacture and services difficult simply because people tend not to stay. Yet, China’s current political system forces growth to take place even though basic conditions and prerequisites for market-based growth are missing. This volume analyses 'ghost cities' and social tension in the process of ‘forced urbanisation’ in which huge amount of resources are wasted, the local environment is systematically damaged and ordinary people’s basic rights are brutally violated in the name of higher GDP and greater government glory.
The book provides a systematic review of research results on regional economic competitiveness, and constructs an evaluation index system based on nine key aspects: the development of a micro-economy; industrial development; enterprise strength; the sciences; education; innovation; environment governance and protection; financial development; and the degree of opening to the outside world. The book subsequently provides policy suggestions on how to enhance the economic and social development of the West of China based on a comprehensive evaluation and analysis. In addition to comparing the recent social development of the provinces in the West, the book also calls upon the central government to play the leading role, encourage mass participation and promote the opening up of the West of China.
This book is a systematic analysis of the trade interconnectivity, logistics, urbanization, and economic development among countries along the Silk Road. The prospects for cooperation amongst countries on the Silk Road are clarified in a book which will interest scholars of geopolitics, of economic growth, and of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
This study examines how different ideological regimes in modern China have all responded to crises, whether economic, territorial, or spiritual, by extending state power and accumulation strategies into the northwestern corner of the country. Histories of modern China have typically turned to eastern centers of state and colonial power, especially Beijing and Shanghai, for an index of economic development and modernity. I show how Northwest China, a seemingly remote backwater, has figured prominently in political economy over the long twentieth century. The dissertation demonstrates how economic planning in China was born not in the People's Republic, but during the Great Depression when the Northwest became the first of a series of focal regions created to transfer capital and population from the coast. "Opening Up the Northwest" was followed by three campaigns launched in the name of correcting regional inequality in the People's Republic of China: the First Five Year Plan (1953-1957), the Third Front (1964-1980), and, most recently, "Open Up the West" (2000-present). My dissertation contributes a cultural and historical perspective to conversations among geographers and political scientists about the growing importance of regional economies as subnational scales of territorial organization. Through a panorama of state campaigns in the Northwest representing fascist, communist, and neoliberal ideologies, my project shows how Chinese leaders have garnered national support by constructing fantasies that speak to the cultural and environmental particularities of the region. State-builders have often inspired a nation to head to the Northwest by likening this region to "virgin land" in the American West or reminding their audiences of past glory along the ancient Silk Road. Beyond the gaze of state authorities, my work delves into complex experiences inflected by gender, class, and ethnicity in the regional center of Xi'an. A closer look at these historical moments reveals the realities of underdevelopment, the dispossession of ethnic minorities and agricultural communities, orphans forcibly recruited for settler colonialism, traditional virtues imposed on "Modern Girls," the criminalization of refugees and migrants, and accelerated environmental degradation. My work contributes to the growing literature on everyday life in China, using the local histories of Xi'an and its environs to show how the material instantiations of modernity always fall short of the desires they engender no matter where they take place.
