Xinjiang’s police hiring binge comes from party boss’s Tibet playbook
Uygur heartland has advertised more than 84,000 security-related positions since September 2016, nearly 50 per cent more than it did in the past 10 years
It’s been almost a year since Communist Party rising star Chen Quanguo took the reins of Xinjiang, China’s Uygur heartland, and police jobs have seen an explosive surge. In the past 11 months, more security staff jobs have been advertised than the combined total over the last decade, latest research has revealed.
The last four months of 2016 saw some 30,000 security jobs advertised, compared with about 1,600 over the year’s earlier months, and the number soared past 53,000 in the first seven months of this year, Zenz found. Data gleaned from government postings on the internet drove his study.
“The massive peak really came with Chen Quanguo ... and is directly related to the establishment of the convenience police stations,” Zenz said, referring to the sprawling net of neighbourhood-based police depots that have cropped up across the region.
Chen, formerly the party boss of neighbouring Tibet, was transferred to rule Xinjiang late last August and has since ramped up security and surveillance by applying policies he had deployed in Tibet, another politically sensitive region where ethnic tension had flared.