Introduction - What Is Destabilizing about China’s Ethnic Regions?

Summary

Why have some minority regions experienced more unrest than others and in more volatile ways in China’s reform era? Why have ethnic mobilization and violence occurred only in the two outer peripheral regions, Tibet and Xinjiang? This study examines these puzzles from the perspective of China’s twofold transition from empire to a modern nation state. That is, the integration of frontier regions into a nation state with predominantly ethnic Han Chinese. The first transition was from empire to the autonomous system in the socialist era. The second transition was from the socialist era (1949–78) to the reform era (1978–present).