The Complex Impact of Urbanization in Xinjiang

Barely a year ago the city of Horgos didn’t exist. It was little other than a rural expanse of small towns, villages, and lavender fields on the farthest fringe of China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, right on the border with Kazakhstan. Once a vibrant junction on the ancient Silk Road, Horgos endured a long descent into obscurity as the trade routes that were its lifeblood dried up, leaving it marooned from the rest of the world by sheer distance, mountains, and deserts. Now, it is precisely this frontier position that has brought Horgos and many of Xinjiang’s other cities to the forefront of China’s national policy, and the influx of development and urbanization which has followed has severely affected the region’s local people and traditional cultures.

Horgos was formally named a municipality on June 29, 2014. With this elevation of status came $3.25 billion in investment from the central government and a hundredfold increase in land area. The reason for this newfound relevance was clear: Horgos was to become the main land port of China’s Belt and Road initiative, a $140 billion network of trade corridors, ports, pipelines, and logistics zones stretching from East Asia to Europe that is otherwise known as the New Silk Road.

As the benefits of shipping overland between Asia and Europe become more evident, trade relations with the countries of Central Asia continue to grow, and industry continues moving inland, the importance of China’s western frontiers has increased proportionally. The vision is to develop some of the cities in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost region, into an economic counterweight to balance out the booming cities of the country’s east coast. If Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen became hubs of global commerce due to the international access their sea ports provided, then why shouldn’t the land ports on the western borderlands experience a similar prosperity? With $16.3 billion in investment from the central government, Xinjiang cities like Horgos, Kashgar and Alataw are being built up to be major economic and logistics hubs – ports for trains and trucks instead of ships.

These recent New Silk Road projects are part of a much broader initiative to develop Xinjiang. In 2012, the government of Xinjiang announced a 20-year plan to completely revamp and urbanize the region with expanded cities, new cities, and a fresh grid of transport infrastructure. The goal was to raise the urbanization rate to 68 percent. Once-obscure places like Yining, Karamay and Aksu are being turned into booming centers of culture and commerce and Beijing is constructing 20 special industrial zones in the region to bolster manufacturing and cross-border trade, while creating more jobs. A high-speed rail line connecting Urumqi to Lanzhou is already in operation and the Lianhuo Expressway bisects Xinjiang neatly through the middle, tying some of its major cities and the border with Kazakhstan to the east coast.