2 - Reforming Governance for Development: a village in southern Xinjiang

How to understand the dynamics of rural development in Xinjiang is a key to unravel the discourse about Xinjiang that now dominates in the West. That discourse isolates the experiences in Xinjiang from the rest of China and similarly ignores the contextual connection between the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Xinjiang, China since the 1990s and the rise of religious fundamentalism globally. This paper will argue that rural Xinjiang on the one hand shared some of the development predicament found in the rest of rural China after 1980s and on the other hand was impacted by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism globally. Based on a recent field research in a rural township in Xinjiang, this paper also examines how governance has been reformed at a time of crisis and how governance for development is practiced at the village level.