China’s peripheries: the cases of Tibet and Xinjiang

China is a country the size of a continent and correspondingly heterogeneous. A detailed examination must therefore differentiate between different regions. In China, the East-West divide is particularly glaring in many respects. While reports about the more developed East coast often dominate the media, other parts of the country tend to be overlooked. This chapter therefore focuses on the more marginalized regions. After a definition of terms and an introduction, the economic importance of the periphery and its political role is discussed. This article takes a closer look at two particularly controversial cases: Tibet and Xinjiang.