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Page added on August 29, 2008

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Xinjiang oil boom fuels Uighur resentment

“Offer energy resources as tribute [to Beijing] to create harmony” proclaims a giant billboard outside a petrol station in Korla, in Xinjiang province, China’s restive western frontier region.


The increasing importance of the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang autonomous region as a source of the energy and minerals needed to fuel China’s booming eastern cities is raising the stakes for Beijing in its battle against separatists agitating for an independent state.
“The Chinese didn’t want to let Xinjiang be independent before, but after they built all the oil fields, it became absolutely impossible,” said one Muslim resident in Korla, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution by government security agents.


The desert around the city is punctuated every kilometre or two by oil and gas derricks, each of them topped with the red Chinese national flag, an assertion of sovereignty over every inch of the energy-rich ground.


Korla itself is an important junction on the 4,200km-long west-east gas pipeline that carries natural gas from Xinjiang to Shanghai.


A brand new airport, high-rise office blocks and scores of new apartment complexes are proof that the city is reaping the fruits of an energy boom that has seen annual natural gas production in the surrounding Tarim Basin increase 20 times between 2000 and 2007. But the vast majority of profits from the industry are sent back east, along with the oil and gas.


In 2005, Xinjiang’s local government was allotted just Rmb240m ($35m) out of the Rmb14.8bn in tax revenue from the petrochemical industries that are based in the region.


In Korla, the oil industry is under the control of a subsidiary of PetroChina, the state-owned energy group, which answers directly to its head office in Beijing.


“We don’t have the power to tell them to do anything, they only listen to their bosses in Beijing,” said one local government official who asked not to be named.


Many of Korla’s original Uighur residents feel they have missed out altogether on the few benefits that have trickled down to the region from the rapid extraction of its energy resources.


Financial Times



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