As the Bo Xilai saga continues, China watchers are struggling to make sense of what Brookings Institution scholar Cheng Li calls the biggest political crisis to strike China since at least the Tiananmen Square Incident on 1989. To many, however, it is increasingly clear that China’s modern rise lies at a crossroads. And despite the drumbeat of unity, elites remain sharply divided over the way forward, with intense debate on a range of policy issues. Among these, one important discussion that has attracted scant media and scholarly attention is China’s ethnic policies.
Inter-ethnic conflict appears on the rise across the mainland, with levels of violence not seen since the Cultural Revolution. The brutal pogrom of nearly two hundred (some claim a thousand) residents of Ürümqi in July 2009 shocked the nation. To many, the Ürümqi incident and the previous year’s unrest in Tibet were powerful signs of a systemic policy failure. And while there’s still no consensus on how best to fix the problem, government officials are now joining academics (and the wider public) in calling for a major policy rethink.






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