Co-opting Separatists: Social Welfare to Cross-Border Minorities in Xinjiang

Abstract

Societal allocation of goods and resources as a means of co-opting potential challengers in authoritarian regimes has received widespread support in political science research. We find evidence for this argument in the case of social welfare spending in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Province (XUAR) region of China. Since the early 1990s Xinjiang has been the scene of interethnic clashes and religious and political conflict, creating challenges in this western area for the central government in Beijing. We use existing official Chinese data on county governments’ fiscal spending in Xinjiang from 1995 to 2003 to identify relationships between regional demographic composition and economic assistance. We find districts with cross-border ethnic and religious minorities located close to the border with neighboring states spend more on social welfare. We also find the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan leads to an increase in social welfare spending in Muslim minority areas. These areas, we argue, receive more welfare due to the threat of separatism posed by cross-border minorities. The results shed light on the mechanisms of governance and co-optation in China and leadership concerns of challenges to regime stability in Xinjiang.