Below is an article published by: The New York Times

This week, The New York Times reported on officials in a county in the western region of Xinjiang offering cash and other incentives to encourage more interethnic marriages, with the goal of defusing ethnic tensions. Many Chinese officials are concerned about increasingly violent conflicts between Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim people who populate large parts of Xinjiang, and the Han, the dominant ethnicity in China. At a two-day work forum on Xinjiang in May, President Xi Jinping called for new policies to better assimilate Uighurs into mainstream Chinese society.

The economic rewards for mixed marriages are being offered in Cherchen County, known as Qiemo in Chinese, to any couple that includes one Han and one member from any of China’s 55 ethnic minorities. According to official statistics, the 10,000 people in this county along the old southern Silk Road and east of the Kunlun Mountains are 73 percent Uighur and 27 percent Han.

Throughout China, Uighurs and Han have among the lowest rates of interethnic marriage, with 1 percent of Uighurs and 1.5 percent of Han living in an interethnic household, according to data from a 2000 census.

The new policy was announced by Cherchen County officials in a statement posted on Aug. 26 [2014] on a government website. After a flurry of Chinese and foreign news reports, the announcement was removed from the website on Wednesday evening.

Two scholars who have examined ethnic policies in Xinjiang and other parts of China shared their thoughts on the new initiative with The Times by email.

James A. Millward, professor of intersocietal history at the Walsh School of Foreign Service and department of history at Georgetown University in Washington:

“In recent years, there has been a good deal of new thinking among Chinese scholars who advise Chinese Communist Party leaders that some kind of change is needed in the highly institutionalized state system by which China administrates different ethnic groups. Some of these ideas are reflected in the recent and highly unusual Central Work Forum on Xinjiang (May 2014), which in addition to discussing the usual plans for economic development in Xinjiang and promising harsh measures to eliminate religious extremists and separatists, also stressed measures to “strengthen inter-ethnic contact, exchange and mingling.” This new language suggests that the CCP recognizes that in addition to nefarious “outside forces” and Islamic cyber-extremism, some of the problems in Xinjiang stem from deep tensions between Han and Uyghur ethnic groups. Efforts at encouraging more contact, exchanges and interaction seem aimed at addressing the deterioration in relations between these groups, a deterioration which was greatly exacerbated by ethnic riots in 2009 and subsequent violence between Uyghurs and police, as well as by recent terrorist attacks.

    Other discussions and new terminology — “ethnic blending” or “fusion” — suggest that Chinese policy-makers are thinking more broadly than even that. Recently, scholars and leaders have begun to use a new rhetoric to talk about China’s multiethnic reality. Rather than the old language (China is a state made up of 56 different and distinct “nationalities,” or minzu), the new approach stresses that there are different “ethnicities” in China, but all are one “Chinese people,” the Zhonghua people — using a different word than “Han” (“Han” refers to the Chinese-speaking majority of China, and is often translated as “Chinese” in English, in contrast to Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongol and so on). Whereas old rhetoric and policies stressed distinctiveness between different groups in China, then, the new language encourages or suggests erasure of those distinctions.

    It’s in this context that we should see the new trial program of cash and other incentives offered to “mixed-race” Han-Uyghur or Han-Mongol married couples in parts of Xinjiang. Intermarriage between Han and Uyghurs has been almost non-existent. It seems that some leaders want to see if these kind of practical incentives can overcome ethnic barriers.

    There is a danger, however, that state-sponsored efforts at “blending” and “fusion” will be seen by Uyghurs in China or by China’s critics anywhere as really aimed at assimilating Uyghurs into Han culture — in other words, as an attempt to Sinify the Uyghurs. This comes at a time when many Uyghurs see such recent policies as the destruction of old Kashgar in the name of development, the elimination of Uyghur-language education and continuing Han migration into the Uyghur traditional homelands in Xinjiang as all threatening the preservation of a distinctive Uyghur culture.”

James Leibold, senior lecturer on the faculty of humanities and social sciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne, is currently teaching at a study abroad program in Beijing:

    “Interethnic marriage has long been an important indicator of social cohesion and national integration, and here figures for China also reveal a pattern of segregation. Although interethnic marriage is common among some smaller minority communities, only 3.2 percent of PRC citizens live in a bi-ethnic household compared to over 8 percent in the United States. According to 2000 census figures, only 1.05 percent of Uyghur, 1.58 percent of Han and 7.71 percent of Tibetan households were bi-ethnic, while in contrast 15 percent of all new marriages in the United States in 2008 were interracial, and 20.2 percent of marriages in Singapore during 2010. In their 2007 survey, [Wenfang] Tang and [Gaochao] He found strong disapproval of interethnic and interracial marriages, especially among the poorly-educated, low-income Uyghur and Kazakh students they questioned. This low level of integration mitigates against ethnic conflict in the short term, while reinforcing ethnic consciousness and the potential for violent clashes in the long run.

    I see these cash incentives as one of a range of local interpretations of the 2nd Central Xinjiang Work Forum’s call for increased interethnic “contact, exchange and mingling” [交往交流交融] and further evidence of the party-state’s attempts at paternalistic social engineering in Xinjiang: ethnic unity and harmony by central fiat!”.