Han-Uygur economic gap grows as firms shun Xinjiang labour

The economic discrepancy between Uygurs and Han Chinese, long held as fuelling the tension in Xinjiang, is threatening to widen in the wake of the riots in Urumqi .

Some labour recruiters outside the region admitted they had grown far less interested in hiring Uygurs.

But analysts say Beijing should boost employment and prevent marginalisation among the mainland's 9 million Uygurs.

Wang Qingyan, a recruiter in Huizhou, Guangdong, who started to hire Uygur workers in 2007, said her company, Cosun Group, had stopped recruiting Uygurs this year because of cultural differences and high resignation rates.

'We hired a maximum of 300 Uygur workers in 2007 when the country encouraged enterprises to provide them job opportunities to narrow the poverty gap. But 85 per cent of them returned to Xinjiang within a year because they weren't accustomed to factory life,' she said. Ms Wang said the firm also had to provide a Muslim diet, Uygur supervisors and sometimes translators for their 42 Uygur assembly workers. The cost made the programme less attractive during the recession.

Cao Qun, a job centre operator in Dongguan who used to introduce Uygur workers to Guangdong factories, said demand was falling. 'Last year, Uygur workers were hot in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces with factory owners eager to rush orders through to meet a deadline. But now even skilled Han Chinese workers can't find jobs,' he said.

Xinjiang started an 'organised migration of spare labourers' in 2005 to address unemployment, Xinhua said. In the first half of 2007, 900,000 Xinjiang labourers, most of whom were Uygurs, earned a total of 1.3 billion yuan (HK$1.5 billion) elsewhere.