I learned a lot of information about China in this course. For example, its political system, economic system, the relations between its regions, and how China developed from past years until now. China has a big history , and I am glad that I know a little bit about that.
I hope this website helps the students, who are interested in China's Geography specially Xinjiang the region that I picked.

I wish all of you have a better year in the next year, and also happy early Christmas. 

Relations between Xinjiang and Taiwan

In recent years, Xinjiang and Taiwan have made a good attempts to enhance their economic exchanges and establish tourism. The two regions have seen an growing number of visitors and investors from each region.

The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has taken local existences into attention and brought out its resource and locality advantage to promote trade and economic activities with Taiwan, resulting in stable personnel exchanges between the two regions and more and more Taiwan businessmen showing keen interest in investing in Xinjiang.

Now days, both sides are analyzing new ways to promote economic and trade activities between hinterland border provinces and regions and Taiwan business people. Xinjiang is gradually prepared itself as the door for opening China to the west because of independent in natural and human resources, having the longest border lines in the country, giving frontiers with the most number of neighboring nations, and having 15 open foreign trade posts.

Xinjiang economy has been playing a very important role in national economic development. Currently, Xinjiang is a superior nation in cotton, watermelon, beet sugar, and hop production. And also the top rice-exporting region between the five northwestern provinces and regions.

Xinjiang and Hong Kong relationships

Between 1980–2004, manufactured goods have appointed for the big ratio instead of primary goods in Xinjiang’s export. From 1963 to 1980, Xinjiang's import and export markets were mainly Japan and Hong Kong. 
As an important source of assets for Xinjiang, Hong Kong had commited up to US$130 million of actual investment - making up 54 per cent of all outside funding running into the northwestern region. Hong Kong's accrued investment in Xinjiang has developed to 400 items, covering textiles, light businesses, food, petrochemicals, tourism, transport and other businesses. 

Hong Kong Vs. Xinjiang

In Hong Kong, the ethnic area between socio-economic elites who control the government and the rest of the population is small. Any developmental programs are accepted by the Hong Kong government, some social groups would face impassable ethnic barriers to accept themselves to the new economic opportunities. 
On the opposite, in Xinjiang, the real political power rests with the Han Chinese, but they are only an ethnic minority in the province. The Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, have often been sidelined from the local government‘s policymaking process.

Relationships between Xinjiang and Macau

Based on the great authority set in the past, the Macau and Xinjiang governments would raise their co-operation in trade, culture, education, and tourism. Over the past 11 years, Macau and Xinjiang had made a well co-operative relationship using education and culture as the starting points. Macau would act as a trading platform, appeal to funds from all over the world to lend in the developing market of Xinjiang. For co-operation between Xinjiang and European countries, Macao can make use of its links with the European Union to more benefit exchanges.

Highway in Xinjiang

Xinjiang had many crudely constructed highways in 1949 with a whole length of 3,361 km, but by 2001, the region’s highways had been extended to 80,900 km, including 428 km of highway, 230 km of Grade 1 highways and 5,558 km of Grade 2 highways. The highway constant over the Taklimakan Desert is a long-distance graded highway, the first one in the world constructed on shifting sands. Now, a network of highway covers the full district,  with Urumqi as the center and seven national highways as the spine associating the region with Gansu and Qinghai provinces to the east, the bordering countries in Central and West Asia to the west and Tibet to the south. The network is also associated with the region’s 68 provincial highways. Now buses run to all cities, prefectures, counties and townships in the region.

The "Sai-Guo" highway at construction site in Xinjiang

High speed train in Xinjiang

Xinjiang will come in into the era of high-speed rail over the next five years of the 12th Five-Year Plan cource. The Lanzhou-Xinjiang high-speed railway, that has been under construction since November 2009, will compress the traveling time between Beijing and Urumiqi, capital of Xinjiang, from 40 hours to 12 hours. Other local governments in the same area as Xinjiang are following the suit. The western part of China is grasping the biggest boom in railway construction.

According to the railway-technology, this train is the first long-distance high-speed line in West China connecting Lanzhou, the capital city of Gansu Province, with Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in north-west China.
The new high-speed line was planned along the direction to connect Xinjiang with the rest of China's high-speed rail network. 

Xinjiang's Energy

Xinjiang is an area rich in resources but lacking in infrastructure. But the Chinese government is directing it towards a more unified role in the energy sector, which means developing coal mining, processing, and transport. For foreign companies, the region show one of the last frontiers within the China market, and potentially one of the most beneficial.

In addition to the energy funneled through Xinjiang, China has been extracting the region for its own resources. "Xinjiang consist gas reserves of 1.4 trillion cubic meters, more than any other region or province", the official China Daily reported in February. Gas production from Xinjiang's Tarim Basin field calculated for more than a fifth of China's total output last year. In 2008, the region produced 27.4 million tons of oil (550,000 barrels per day), or over 14 percent of China's output, making it the country's second-biggest oil center. "Xinjiang also has 40 percent of China's coal reserves", the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Xinjiang's Trade

In 1988, border trade exports and imports over only US$36.0 million, accounting for 8.8 percent of the all foreign trade of the independent region. It was in the 1990s that the border trade really started to take off, climbing from US$94.4 million in 1991 to US$981.0 million in 2001. It calculated for more than half of the independent region's foreign trade for 10 successive years. The border trade has become a base and major growth area of Xinjiang's foreign trade and its economy as a whole.
Since 1986, the region has looked for ways to take advantage of its potential for growth when the central government gave approval to Xinjiang to conduct border trade. By 2002, its border trade was the second largest between the nine land border provinces, second only to Heilongjiang.

Xinjiang is a wide land with a low population aggregation, fewer industrial and mining companies within watered areas and comparatively little pollution which results in agricultural products meeting the provisions of being green or natural and protecting the environment. Many products can avoid devastation by plant disease and bugs. Almost closed geographical position, and so the dosage of farm chemicals can be decrease to the minimum. Statistics also show products with a “green food” sign are between the most popular in China.

Agricultural products in Xijiang are specific with powerful regional features, as they can't easily grow in other places. Even if those products grow elsewhere, their quality is mostly low compared with those from Xinjiang. It doesn't matter whether it is the white cotton and sugar, Chinese wolfberry, safflower, red tomato, carrot and chili, or different kinds of colorful fruits and melons, only those produced in Xinjiang are really great.

Agriculture in Xinjiang has been frequently mechanized and the operation is the major method of farming. Overhead applications of pesticides are carried out,  while cotton and weeding reaping by machine also occurs. The ploughing, grading, sowing, application and collecting procedures of staple agricultural products like cotton, wheat and corn are largely mechanized, and people manage and do some ancillary work.

Xinjiang's Economy

Before the establish of the People’s Republic of China, the economy of Xinjiang was a natural economy, with farming and livestock reproduction as the mainstay. Industry was straggling  and there were no railways or up-to-the-mark factories or mines. Hunger were repeated in some areas, and the people were impoverished. Xinjiang was peacefully opened on September 25, 1949. On October 1, 1955, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was established, opening a new page for historic development in Xinjiang. In the past half century, Xinjiang’s economy and social undertakings have advanced by leaps and bounds.

Fast growth of the economy

Xinjiang’s foreign trade is navigated in multiple pliable ways, including spot trade, border trade, processing with materials supplied by clients, restitution trade, and tourism. By 2001, Xinjiang had trade relations with 119 countries and regions. Nearly 1,000 merchandise items in 22 categories were on the export list. Between them, 10 export commodities got more than US$ 10 million each. The total cost of Xinjiang’s exports and imports averaged to US$ 1.77 billion in that year. The export product mix has been permanently improved, from primary bulk products with low added cost to electromechanical and accuracy appliances with high added value. Now, manufactured goods account for 67% of Xinjiang’s exports.

Sources: http://www.academia.edu/413545/Private_Sector_Development_In_Xinjiang_China_
A_Comparison_Between_Uyghur_and_Han

Population in Xinjiang

Xinjiang is home to 19 million people, about 8 percent of China’s population. In 1949, about 15 percent of the people Xinjiang were Han Chinese, 75 percent were Uighurs and 10 percent were other. In 1949 Urumqi was only 20 percent Chinese, now it is 80 percent. Kazakhs made up roughly 9 percent of the population the 1940s and only 7 percent today.

Today Uighurs make up approximately 40 percent to 45 percent of the population of Xinjiang. Although their numbers have been watery in northern Xinjiang by Han Chinese settlers and are now more there the Uighurs are still the majority in southern Xinjiang. Han Chinese have grown from 9 percent of the population of Xinjiang in 1945 to 40 percent today.

Ethnic Groups

"The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is indwell by people of many ethnic groups. Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, an increasing number of people have moved to and from Xinjiang, making more leading the phenomenon of a multiethnic population living together." Especially since reform and opening-up in 1978, many citizens, guided by market forces, have mostly moved together and on their own will between Xinjiang's rural and urban areas, between its northern and southern areas, and between Xinjiang and other inland areas, for the goals of education, employment, business or job-seeking.

Source: http://www.womenofchina.cn/html/womenofchina/report/1056401.htm
http://www.china.org.cn/english/China/165014.htm

Xinjiang politics

Xinjiang  which was annexed by China in the mid-eighteenth century, is mostly populated by Turkic-speaking Muslims, the majority of whom are Uyghurs. A long custom of exchanges with China, these people are connected,  primarily by relation of culture and religion, to the Central Asian world. Probably this is one reason why, though they are becoming increasingly unified with China, they have never very willingly accepted the idea of sharing a common destiny with the Chinese people.

Late in 1949, Xinjiang capitulated to the Chinese Communists without a battle, but there was a Uigur insurrection in Hotan in 1954. On the base of the 1953 census, which showed the Uigurs to comprise 74% of the population, Xinjiang was again an independent region. Independent districts were made as well for the Kazakhs, Mongols, Hui, and Kyrgyz. In the 1950s and 1960s, the central government sent massive numbers of Chinese to Xinjiang to help develop water-conservancy and mineral-exploitation plans. This has drastically changed the population balance, and the Chinese are approaching numerical parity with the Uigurs. National defense has been an attention in the strategic and susceptible region too. In 1969, frontier incidents led to fighting between Soviet and Chinese forces along the border.

In the 1990s, the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang grew increasingly not not satisfied with Chinese rule, in part because of the immigration of great numbers of Chinese to the area as a result of government resettlement programs, and rioting by pro-independence Muslims broke out in 1997. China subsequently increased the number of troops in the region, and has established a harsh crackdown on political dissent and Turkic separatists. Orthodox Islamic practices have been disappointed or suppressed by the government for fear that they will become a focus of Uigur nationalism. Occasional anti-Chinese protests and ethnic insurgency have occurred since 1997, most violently in 2009, and there also have been separatist attacks on government officials and buildings and other targets.

Work Cites: http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/world/xinjiang-history.html#ix
http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/648

Xinjiang Traditions and Culture

Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has a wealthy and time-honored cultural tradition, shaped by a diversity of ethnic groups and constituting an important part of the Chinese culture.
Xiyu (the "western regions") is the ancient name of Xinjiang. Since very old time, many different ethnic groups have been living integrated in this area. These hardworking and creative people have contributed to the world-renowned Xiyu Culture, which covers a wide spectrum.
Over the last five decades, the Xinjiang people have continued their rich cultural traditions, and further developed and enriched their distinct multi-ethnic cultures, thus making today's cultural scene in Xinjiang even more exotic and appealing.

Xinjiang has long been known as "a land of song and dance." Singing and dancing are integral parts of the local life and have been around for centuries. Impressed by the ancient Silk Road civilizations, and the exchange and integration of the Eastern and Western cultures, the song-and-dance styles have developed their own unique charm and stand out as sparkling jewels among all such art forms across China.

The history of Xinjiang's arts and culture development is yet another martyrdom to China's remarkable growth over the years. At the dawn of the 21st century, the people in Xinjiang, in particular all those who are private to its cultural development, are determined to carry forward their cultural traditions, learn from all different cultures, be open to new ideas, and with spirit and confidence work with all peoples of the world to build a global civilization that fully embraces the ideal of "harmony in diversity."

Work Cite: http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_focus/2005-09/13/content_72771_3.htm

Water pollution in Xinjiang

Water scarcity has been one of the largest problems facing Xinjiang. Between the 1950s and 1980s, Xinjiang saw a massive decrease in the total surface area of its lakes, from 9,700 square kilometers to 4,953 square kilometers. Climate related drought and human activities are the two major causes for the shrinking of Xinjiang's lakes. In the late 1950s, thirteen dams were built on the upper reaches of the Kongque River for irrigation purposes. By 1964, Lake Lop Nor, which was fed by the river, completely dried up.

With naturally salty water, Xinjiang also faces problems with water salinization. There are only three freshwater lakes in Xinjiang—out of a total of one hundred and thirty-nine. Over the past few decades, the salinity of Xinjiang's lakes has increased as many lakes have begun to dry up. As lake water depths have decreased, the proportion of salt in the water has likewise increased.

Xinjiang is hometown to 47 ethnic minorities, which together account for 60% of its total population. Of the 47 ethnic minorities, 13 are native, including the Uygur, the main ethnic group living here. The Uygur have their own language and religious belief, Islam.

Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is located in the central part of the Eurasian Continent, on the northwest border of China. Xinjiang takes up one sixth of China’s total area, 16 times as large as Zhejiang Province, making it the largest of China’s regions and provinces.

In Xinjiang there are glaciers, snow-capped mountains, immense deserts, dense forests, lush grasslands, lakes, wetlands and the fantastic Yadan landform unique to Xinjiang. You can find almost all kinds of natural scenery in this region. People who have lived in the cities for too long will feel their visions broadened when they see the beauty of the great nature in Xinjiang.

Source: http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/xinjiang/