Reporting from Urumqi, China, and Beijing — Wearing a dirty striped T-shirt, scuffed loafers and dusty cargo pants, Liu Xiuyi arrived in Urumqi last week after a 56-hour train ride that took him from the east coast to the farthest reaches of China's northwest.
Like the young Americans who in the 19th century followed Horace Greeley's imperative to "Go west, young man," the 26-year-old Liu left home in search of a job, space and opportunity. He knew nothing about the Xinjiang region except rumors that you could make more than $400 a month here, almost twice as much as back home in Jiangsu province.
"I heard everything was great here, but when I got in, everything was scary," Liu said in a thick country accent.
What Liu didn't realize when he boarded the train was that ethnic tensions in Xinjiang were exploding, fueled in part by the westward migration of people like himself.
At least 180 people have been confirmed dead in street fighting between the Han, China's dominant ethnic group, and the native Uighurs of Xinjiang.
Record numbers of migrants have been pouring into Xinjiang, spurred by the global financial crisis that is closing down export-driven factories in the east and curtailing new construction in Beijing and Shanghai. The Chinese government says 1.2 million people migrated here last year.
And that's not counting the hundreds of thousands who come to pick cotton and potatoes, recruited by the quasi-military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which has extensive farmland.
This year especially, local governments fearing social unrest caused by unemployment have played a role in organizing trips. The city of Chongqing in central China announced that it was sending 100,000 people to Xinjiang this year. In March, one county in Ningxia, in northern China, held a large ceremony for 3,200 peasants who were being sent out.
In effect, they chose to export instability to western China.
The Uighurs, a Turkic people whose majority here has been slipping away, complain that the outsiders are gobbling up the best jobs. Many employers here refuse to hire Uighurs for even the most menial positions, whether picking cotton or working in mines.
"Room service staff needed, 18-40 years old. Junior high school degree required. Han only," read an advertisement last week on a bulletin board at a government-run labor agency in Urumqi.
