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The importance of Xinjiang Province in China’s Eurasian connectivity initiative—the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)—has received some coverage in the media. However, these news articles offer only a cursory view of China’s primary motive in pursuing the initiative, that is the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang. This paper argues that the conflict in Xinjiang is a main driving force to pursue SREB and that the initiative is congruent with a broader