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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail Yahoo! Search Search: Sign InNew User? Sign Up News Home - Help Navigation Primary Navigation Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Top Stories Most Popular Secondary Navigation Australia China India Indonesia Japan Malaysia Philippines Thailand Vietnam Search Search: China Xinjiang chief survives political firestorm By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN,Associated Press Writer AP - Monday, September 7 BEIJING - As leader of the volatile far western Xinjiang territory for 15 years, Wang Lequan is the closest China has to a regional strongman. ADVERTISEMENT So it's little wonder a recent purge of lower-ranking officials over a spate of bloody unrest has done nothing to clip his authority, underscoring both the extent of his power and China's extreme sensitivity over any changes in the leadership of this strategic, conflict-ridden territory. Angry protesters poured into the streets of the regional capital Urumqi last week, demanding the removal of Wang and other officials over deadly ethnic rioting in July and a string of unnerving needle attacks blamed by the government on Muslim separatists. Officials say five people died in the protests and 21 have been detained on suspicion of stabbing people with needles. On Saturday, the protesters won a partial victory with the firing of Urumqi's Communist Party Secretary Li Zhi and Xinjiang's regional police chief. Wang, 64, escaped without so much as a reprimand. "Wang Lequan is too big," said an Urumqi beverage seller on Sunday, who would give only his surname, Chen, for fear of official reprisals. "There is nothing you can do." If anything, last week's protests may have strengthened Wang's position because Beijing will always favor a tough approach toward ethnic unrest, even if that just aggravates the tensions, said Michael Davis, a professor of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "The government has shown that every time this problem flares, rather than reconsider the problem, they crack down, and the hard-liners take a dominant position," Davis said. Paramilitary forces maintained a strong presence on the Urumqi's streets on Sunday, but there was no sign of new protests of the sort that had called for Wang's ouster and forced him to address demonstrators outside his office on Thursday. Residents told reporters they were basically satisfied with the dismissals and wanted a return to normalcy _ although they repeated demands for a speedy end to the needle attacks and prosecutions of suspects in the July riots that killed 197 people. A close ally of President Hu Jintao, Wang has led Xinjiang, China's westernmost region that abuts Central Asia, since 1994 _ an unprecedented term in modern Chinese politics. He's consolidated his hold on power by combining a hard line toward the region's native Turkic Muslim Uighur ethnic group with an unremitting drive to develop the region's economy and mineral wealth. Under Wang's policies, the Uighur language has been marginalized through the introduction of bilingual education and Muslim religious life tightly controlled. Advocates for Uighur cultural rights have been harassed and jailed while thousands have reportedly been rounded up in sweeps for extremists. At the same time, Xinjiang's population has swelled with the addition of millions of ethnic Han migrants from elsewhere in China, while Urumqi has grown into a Central Asian economic powerhouse. Wang has milked Beijing for investment and loans, while turning the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps., a sort of government-within-a-government with its own militia and courts _ into a corporation listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Stirring the resentment, many Uighurs complain the new jobs and economic benefits have accrued largely to the Han population, who they regard as having occupied their homeland. Many Han, for their part, regard Uighurs as lazy and ungrateful for the development brought by Chinese rule. Born in the eastern province of Shandong, Wang came of age politically during the chaos of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, rising in 1989 to vice governor of his native province. Beginning in 1991, Wang began his steady climb up the Xinjiang leadership ladder, taking over as acting party secretary just three years later. During his time in Shandong, Wang served for four years as deputy secretary of the provincial Communist Youth League, lending him access to Hu at a time when the future president and Communist Party leader was cementing his power base within the league's national committee in Beijing. The close ties paid off and in 2002, the year Hu took over as party head, Wang gained a seat on the Communist Party's powerful Politburo. "You don't survive leadership changes unless you have built up very powerful apparatus in Xinjiang," Beijing-based China commentator Russell Leigh Moses said. The two men remain close, a sign of Hu's reliance on Wang to hold the line in Xinjiang. Wang is renowned for his tough, salty talk on the need to crush terrorism, religious extremism, and separatism _ a rhetorical flair shared by a former deputy Zhang Qingli, now Tibet's hard-line party boss. "These guys are fantasizing if they think they can disrupt the Olympics," Wang said in 2008, after crushing a series of alleged plots blamed on Uighur separatists ahead of the Beijing games. "They don't have the strength." ___ Associated Press writer Henry Sanderson in Beijing contributed to this report. 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