Shaoying Zhang is Associate Professor of Sociology at Yunnan Normal University, China.   Derek McGhee is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton, UK.

• 1. Introduction 2. The Partner Assistant Programme: the Examination of Policies and Unintended Consequences 3. Fieldwork in China 4. The Configuration of Xinjiang's Problems 5. Multi-Layered 'Unification': The Examination of Government Practices in PAP 6. Infrastructures of the Communist Party in Discourse Making and Resistances of Han Officials in Governing Uygur People 7. Discussion 8. Conclusion

"Shaoying Zhang and Derek McGhee should be commended for providing an innovative and rigorous analysis of the relationship between state policy and ethnic conflict in Xinjiang. In particular, their focus on the ways in which officials in Xinjiang selectively interpret and implement central government policy illuminates the importance of factoring in local agents of state power in analyses of contemporary Chinese governance" - Dr Michael Clarke, Griffith Asia Institute, Queensland, Australia