Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

One of the most transformative politico-economic phenomena in the world in the past few decades has been the process of economic marketization. Do free market economic reform polices – such as those implemented by China in the past four decades – have an impact on the prospects for ethnic conflict? We know little about how marketization affects domestic political stability and the chances for ethnic violence. In this paper, we focus on Xinjiang, China because it provides a unique testing ground: the fact that China has engaged in substantial economic reform without substantial political reform allows us to examine effects of economic factors on violence while holding political factors constant. Our disaggregated approach – using county-year as the unit of analysis – allows us to better specify local precipitants of ethnic violence. Empirically, we use a county-level database of violent incidents – the Ethnic Violence in China (EVC). We also take advantage of a particular data set, the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Surveys (1998-2013), to create measures of marketization by looking at the share of non-state enterprises in industrial output and employment at the county level. This study sheds new light on the field of ethnic violence.