Having mentioned last week the challenges facing a country the size of India in ensuring its integrity, it’s worth mentioning the challenges facing that other regional giant, China.
As reported in the China Daily newspaper today, Chinese President Hu Jintao was in Turkmenistan over the weekend meeting his counterpart to discuss joint efforts to combat separatism and terrorism. The meeting follows the Urumqi riots in China’s northwest on July 5, which involved violent confrontations between Uyghurs and Han–the largest ethnic group in China.
China’s rise to superpower status is often written about as if it’s inevitable (although our upcoming APAC 2020 feature has some interesting dissenting opinions on this). But ensuring security and, perhaps just as importantly, some kind of unifying identity and sense of purpose (and by ‘ensuring’ I don’t mean imposing) in such a vast country will be no easy task.