A major development project, comparable to those launched in California during the depression, is now beginning in China's Xinjiang province. Its attractions include not only the hope of economic development, but a chance to emulate the American way of life. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of numerous books on China and monitors the Chinese-language news media for New California Media (www.ncmonline.com).

Could a second California arise within the next few decades in China's far western Xinjiang province? China's leaders have launched a vast development project designed to do just that.

Xinjiang is twice the size of California but there are many similarities -- they are at about the same latitude, have similar climates, and are divided into a north and south by mountains.

But California has rich agricultural valleys because great water works were constructed to bring water to the deserts -- beginning in the 1930s, large-scale projects, especially those diverting Colorado River water to California agriculture, made California the economic and social giant it is today.

China's new "Great Western Frontier" project aims to do the same for Xinjiang with water from the lofty Tian Shan mountains and water form the Tarim River. Today around 14 million people live in the province. By mid-century it could rise to California's level of 34 million.

Speaking recently before the National People's Congress, chief planner Zeng Peiyan stressed that the project's "is an enormous long-term task and will require several generations of difficult struggle." But in his closing speech to the Congress, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji pointed to what could be a key source of help by calling on foreign investors to get involved, as investors from China's prosperous coastal cities are already.

The two chief foreign investors Zhu has in mind are the United States and Taiwan. Xinjiang is an extension of the Caspian and Central Asian region rich in oil and natural gas, and Zhu announced the building of a natural gas pipeline from the Tarim basin to Shanghai. American firms have long been interested in such efforts if the Chinese government provide the infrastructure.

And while he angrily warned Taiwan's voters not to elect a pro-independence candidate (they did, in fact!) he also beckoned Taiwan investors. Trade between the two countries has been rising all through the 1990s, reaching its highest level yet last year -- with Taiwan enjoying a rising balance of payments surplus. Significantly, within days of the election, Taiwan's parliament voted to allow direct trade with China.

The White House has been tilting more and more towards China. That, combined with the fact that he was elected by far less than a majority of voters, means President-elect Chen Shui-pien will sooner rather than later somehow accommodate to Beijing so Taiwan business can get a freer hand in its biggest market, the Chinese mainland.

There is another -- and perhaps in the end most important -- aspect to the GWF project. California has long fascinated Chinese. You can find Micky and Minnie Mouse or their Chinese variants everywhere. People in China are entranced by shopping malls and Hollywood films are the rage. It's not just American high-tech the Chinese admire, but the American way of life.

Urumchi, Xinjiang's capital, already has an American-style cityscape, and the province is moving quickly to get on line like much of China.

But, as every Chinese knows, the people of Xinjiang are not for the most part ethnic Chinese. Although more and more Chinese are coming in to stay, the main peoples now in Xinjiang are the Uigurs, who predominate in the south, and Kazakhs, most of them in the north. Uigurs and Kazakhs speak related but different Turkic languages and most speak Chinese, while few Chinese speak either of the other languages.

Xinjiang poses more difficult problems for Beijing than Tibet. The Chinese are as unlikely to leave Xinjiang as Anglos are to leave California because of the coming Latino majority.

Most mainland Chinese, products of long socialist indoctrination, believe that economic progress, equally distributed, can solve most political problems. In a sense China is trying something like the quasi-socialist approach used by the US in the depression era -- which spawned the great California water projects.

If all Xinjiang's diverse peoples benefit from significant economic progress, the Chinese leadership hopes ethnic tensions that currently afflict the area will subside. And the troubles now afflicting the same or similar peoples living just across the border in post-Soviet countries won't spread eastward into China.

China's leaders must see California's own GWF project of the 1930's as a big success. Almost three quarters of a century later an increasingly Spanish speaking California still feels sealed off from the troubles south of the border. Last spring when Islamic fundamentalists in Xinjiang neighbor Kyrgyzstan seized four Japanese geologists and held them for many months Beijing said and did nothing. The GWF project is their counter-move against Islamic fundamentalism.