China Frontier Regions ─ Ethnicity, Economic Integration and Foreign Relations

China has traditionally viewed her frontier regions—Zxinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Yunnan—as buffer zones. Yet their importance as commercial and cosmopolitan hubs, intimately involved in the transmission of goods, peoples and ideas between China and it west and southwest has meant they are crucial for China’s ongoing development. The resurgence of China under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘reform and opening’ has therefore led to a focus on integrating these regions into the PRC (People’s Republic of China). This has important implications not only for the frontier regions themselves but also for the neighbouring states, with which they have strong cultural, religious, linguistic and economic ties. China’s Frontier Regions explores the challenges presented by this integrationist policy, both for domestic relations and for diplomatic and foreign policy relations with the countries abutting their frontier regions.

Michael E. Clarke is Associate Professor at the National Security College, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra. He has published extensively on the history and politics of Xinjiang, Uyghur separatism, nationalism and terrorism, Chinese foreign policy in Central Asia, Australian foreign and defence policy and global nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation dynamics. He is the author of Xinjiang and China’s Rise in Central Asia: A History (2011) and (with Stephan Fruehling and Andrew O’Neil), Australia’s Nuclear Policy: Strategic, Economic and Normative Dimensions (2015).