More than a century ago, American settlers followed the call to go west.
And Chinese settlers have done it, too. They've gone west into sparsely populated areas - like Tibet and Xinjiang. By some counts, Han Chinese settlers now outnumber the natives in both places. The Chinese government sees this as an effort to tame China's West and to integrate it into China's booming economy. The World's Mary Kay Magistad continues our series on China's urbanization in the western Chinese city of Xining.

All photos: Mary Kay Magistad

---

Magistad: In a square, in front of a history and culture museum, older women in matching pink jackets are practicing a Chinese fan dance, as their coach sings a patriotic song.

The women swoop and swirl, their fans unfurled, as their coach urges them to put a little more feeling in it. A big screen nearby flashes promos for the Beijing Olympics,

This scene could easily be in Beijing, or any eastern Chinese city. But it's in Xining, in the far western province of Qinghai, a former part of the Tibetan kingdom. Just half a century ago, most of the people in Qinghai were Tibetan. The Dalai Lama was born just a few dozen miles from here.

But China has laid claim over this area since the early 18th century, and made it a province in the early 20th. When the Communist Party came to power, it started its first "Go West!" campaign – urging patriotic young Chinese to go settle the wild wastelands in the west.

A couple of 20-year-olds who answered the call were the parents of taxi-driver Wang Xiaomei:

Wang: "They were young people, they were hot-blooded, and they came here to support the western development. There were a lot of people who came here to support, and find their opportunities here."

Cab driver Wang Xiaomei

Magistad: Many of those young people helped to build up cities in western China – cities like Xining, which is now mostly Han Chinese. A second Go West campaign started 8 years ago. It's caused Xining to boom, and these days when Wang drives her taxi around, displaying both the Chinese and Olympic flags on her dashboard, she likes what she sees.

Wang: "Especially in these past 10 years, there are a lot of changes. Living here, I don't feel it is a far west city of the country. I feel whatever things there are in the east, we have here too."

Ask Tibetans here how all this development has affected them, and you may well get a different answer. I did, from a young Tibetan man visiting a sick relative at the Tibetan Medicine hospital. Life is hard, he says and his family is poor – and that's true of most Tibetans he knows.

Tibetan temple inside a police compound

A Tibetan monk visiting the same hospital, says in the 20 years he's been a monk it's always been hard to practice his religion freely, but especially in the months since Tibetan protests broke out across the region in March. He says the monks in his monastery didn't protest, but Communist Party officials still came to lecture them about being loyal to the Party. The monk seems resigned to the fact that Han Chinese are in control here, of an area that used to be Tibetan, but it doesn't mean he has to like it.

Monk: "Look at this city, it's really a Han Chinese place now. And even those here who were Tibetan by birth aren't really Tibetan anymore, because they don't speak the Tibetan language anymore. They've grown used to the Han way of life."

Prayer flags inside the Tibetan temple

Magistad: I wanted to talk more about this with a Tibetan schoolteacher I met near the hospital. She proudly told me that she'd just finished writing a book on Tibetan culture, that she'd just taken it to the printers. But when I asked to interview her, she looked uneasily around and said, "I don't.dare. Tibetans here are watched every hour, every second."

The taxi cab driver Wang Xiaomei says she knows nothing of this. She says she was shocked by the recent Tibetan protests in the region, because she never felt any tension with Tibetans here:

Wang: "I've known some people who were Tibetans, and I went to school with some Tibetan classmates. We were all alright, and I thought they were nothing different from us Han people. We were all on good terms."
Magistad: They've never told you they have mixed feelings about so many Han Chinese coming here?
Wang: No, I've never heard about their mixed feelings.

Magistad: Then again, Wang admits, she's not really close friends with any Tibetans. It doesn't occur to her that the prosperity Han settlers like her family have helped build up here – and in Tibet and Xinjiang - -could be greeted by the natives with anything other than gratitude.

Xining market

But stroll around the shops and markets here in Xining – and you'll find relatively few Tibetans running their own shops and businesses. Even the stalls selling Tibetan crafts in this open market are run by Han Chinese and Hui Muslims. The few Tibetans who are here are either buying a few supplies, to bring back out to the countryside – or, like this man, begging.

Magistad: Tibet, too, has this problem, especially since the high-altitude train started going there a couple of years ago, bringing ever more Han Chinese. And then there's Xinjiang, a far western region whose original Turkic Muslim population, Uighurs, are now outnumbered by Han Chinese settlers. Some were paid generous incentive fees to move there. Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer says these settlers have taken over Uighur homes and land and businesses. They've also made Xinjiang's capital Urumqi much bigger and more modern – but also, much more Han than even a couple of decades ago:

Kadeer: "At that time, Uighurs were of course poor, but still better than today. The Chinese at least recognized it was the land of the Uighurs, and they couldn't openly harass or persecute our people. There were not a lot of Chinese people. Now it's something like 80 percent of the people in the city are Chinese."

Magistad: Kadeer at first did well for herself by doing business with the Chinese in the 1980s and ‘90s. But then, she says, China's policies toward the Uighurs got more aggressive, and she started speaking out. She said Uighur language and culture were beign suppressed, and Uighurs were being shut out of good jobs. She said those who protested were too often labeled terrorists, arrested and sometimes executed. For her efforts, she got six years in prison. She's now in exile in Washington, DC, still trying to draw attention to the high price Uighurs are paying for China's push west:

Kadeer: "So the Chinese government's intent is to completely assimilate both the Uighur and Tibetans as the time goes by, because they think time is on their side. So China's Western Development project has only brought us and Tibetans disaster, because all the power, privilege rights, everything, is only reserved for the enjoyment of Chinese settlers."

Magistad: Back in Xining, a middle-aged Han Chinese insurance salesman named Hao Haiting asks, is that so bad?

Hao: "In America, you had your ‘go West' campaign too. You developed the west, and a lot of Europeans went to the west part of America. So it is a trend that the more advanced part will take over the more backward part."

Magistad: That's not the official line on China's Go West campaign. China's leaders point to the considerable achievements of the campaign – the double-digit economic growth, and the endless new opportunities for poor, inland provinces that had, until recently, missed out on much of China's economic boom. These achievements are not just focused on areas with non-Han native populations. Sichuan province, for instance, used to be one of China's poorest and most populous, one of its main suppliers of migrants to coastal factories. Now, thanks to the Western development campaign, factories are moving inland, and Sichuan's cities are booming. So is Chongqing, which was part of Sichuan until a decade ago.

Street in Chongqing

Today's Chongqing has been compared to Chicago in the 19th century – an inland port, a manufacturing center, a gateway to the west. Bigger ships are expected to come here once the Three Gorges Dam makes the Yangtze River more navigable. In anticipation, the central government has poured billions of dollars into building Chongqing as the capital of the "Go West" campaign. The city is now growing at a frenetic pace, and it impresses many who visit here.

But at a business lunch, Chongqing native and motorcycle parts marketing manager Yang Tao says it's still not good enough. He says if Chongqing wants to be a regional leader, the local government has to do better at dropping its old socialist mindset and cutting red tape:

Yang: "We don't think this government in Chongqing already good enough to create this good environment for everyone to come here. They want to do, but they don't have enough skill to do it well. So – it will take time."

Magistad: But the process is well underway, and Yang is optimistic. Come back in five or six years, he says, and the changes will be huge. Already, the changes have been huge, in many cities throughout western China. Whether you think that's a good thing depends on whether you're one of those reaping the economic rewards, or one of those feeling shut out and marginalized in your own land.

Chongqing at night

For The World, I'm Mary Kay Magistad, Chongqing, China.