Experts believe multi-ethnic settlements could help promote cultural exchanges and curb terrorist activities, though its implementation faces many difficulties, after Premier Li Keqiang said Saturday China will pursue the program to strengthen ethnic fusion.

At the opening meeting of the Fourth Session of the 12th National People's Congress on Saturday, Premier Li said in the annual report on the work of the government that the establishment of multi-ethnic settlements will push through to improve exchanges and fusion among different ethnic groups.

"Multi-ethnic settlements will assuage ethnic tensions in regions inhabited by ethnic minorities," Niu Fengrui, director of the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

Multi-ethnic integration was a key issue raised by President Xi Jinping at the second central work conference on Xinjiang in 2014, who called for the region to build communities for residents of different ethnic groups to boost understanding by living, working, and studying together.

Xinjiang built a residential community outside the city of Hotan in 2014 to help foster economic and social integration among different ethnic groups, which consists of 600 housing apartments and 600 greenhouses, the Xinjiang Daily reported.

Though promising, experts said that the implementation of multi-ethnic settlements will not be achieved in a short run.

"Unlike Singapore which has an ethnic quota in the distribution of public housing, Xinjiang does not have a compulsory policy for reallocation, as it may spark extremism and sour relations between different ethnic groups," Turgunjan Tursun, a research fellow at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times. Echoing Tursun, Niu said that Xinjiang's ethnic composition is way more complicated.

As China's biggest administrative region by land area, Xinjiang is home to 22 million people, with up to 46 percent Muslim Uyghurs, followed by 39 percent Han and 7 percent Kazakh.

Meanwhile, "cultural differences, language barriers and misunderstanding among different ethnic groups have also hindered the progress of multi-ethnic settlements," Turgunjan added.

"Instead of multi-ethnic settlements, the government should rely more on incentives that can tangibly benefit all groups, especially ethnic minorities, to promote ethnic fusion," Niu said.

Turgunjan said the government should build more facilities such as supermarkets which would cater to minorities' special needs, bilingual schools as well as religious sites, while encouraging Han people to move to areas inhabited by ethnic minorities by creating more job opportunities.


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