The town is the latest addition to a vast network of such communities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China’s biggest province by land area and also its most ethnically troubled. Neighbouring Tibet has long been roiled by ethnic tension, too, but rarely has it witnessed the kind of violence that has troubled Xinjiang: a low-level insurgency involving ethnic Uighurs whose Muslim faith and Central Asian culture and language set them apart from the Han Chinese who dominate places like 38th Regiment. On April 23rd, 21 people were killed near Kashgar during an encounter between police and alleged separatists. An explosion of inter-ethnic violence in 2009 in the regional capital, Urumqi, that left nearly 200 dead, by official reckoning, exacerbated the divide. The expansion of the settlement network is deepening it further.

To use its full name, the 38th Regiment of the 2nd Agricultural Division is part of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. This state-run organisation, usually referred to as the bingtuan (Chinese for a military corps) controls an area twice the size of Taiwan, broken into numerous parts scattered around the province (see map). A few bits are city-sized. Most are more like towns or villages. Of their total population of more than 2.6m people, 86% are ethnically Han Chinese. In Xinjiang as a whole, in contrast, Han officially make up just over 40% of the 22m inhabitants. The rest are Uighurs and a few other ethnic groups.

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In southern Xinjiang, where Uighurs are still usually in the majority, the bingtuan is extending its reach: creating new settlements or upgrading existing ones. In 2004 it formed 224th Regiment in the desert about 75km (45 miles) west of Khotan, a city regarded by officials as a hotbed of Uighur separatism. The regiment now has a permanent population of 12,000, of whom 98% are Han (though Uighurs help pick its red dates at harvest-time). In 2010, 38th Regiment was launched. The town’s population has already grown from nothing to more than 4,800. Its aim is to triple that number. New residents come from the central province of Henan and from communities in neighbouring Gansu province whose villages were damaged by an earthquake in 2008. Some are given a new flat and land as an incentive to move. The bingtuan has spent hundreds of millions of dollars bringing water from the Molcha River 80km away. “I hope to live here for another 20 years,” says a young Han teacher with kibbutznik zeal. No Uighurs are to be seen.

The 38th Regiment (which also plants dates) describes itself as strategically located on a route into southern Xinjiang. In August it formed a militia battalion, which has been conducting counter-terrorism drills. It might do better to consider the impact of resettling Uighur nomads into a separate cluster of new houses a kilometre away. Even in the vastness of the Taklimakan desert, the divide is growing.

‘Settlers in Xinjiang’, The Economist (China Edition).