Over the last year, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) Party Secretary Chen Quanguo (陈全国) has dramatically increased the police presence in Xinjiang by advertising over 90,000 new police and security-related positions. [1] This soldier-turned-politician is little known outside of China, but within China he has gained a reputation as an ethnic policy innovator, pioneering a range of new methods for securing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule over Uyghurs, Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in western China.
Born into a poor family in rural Henan province, Chen worked his way up the CCP ladder, serving first under Premier Li Keqiang in his native Henan, before becoming Party Secretary of neighboring Hebei province. In 2011, he was handed the difficult task of ruling the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), which had once again erupted into violence in 2008. During his five years in Tibet, he restored stability through the construction a sophisticated network of surveillance and control. After being transferred to the XUAR in August 2016, he quickly rolled out the same securitization strategy, accomplishing in a single year what took him five years in the TAR.[Source]