Parts of China's troubled north-west region of Xinjiang have begun offering cash to interethnic couples as part of a drive to assimilate the culturally distinct Uighur minority.

Qiemo county, part of the 460,000 sq km Bayinguoleng autonomous Mongolian prefecture, announced the policy in late August, calling it a "big celebratory gift package" for couples in which one member is an ethnic minority and the other is Han Chinese.

The package includes annual cash payments of 10,000 yuan (£980) for interethnic couples during the first five years of their marriage, as well as housing, healthcare and education subsidies, according to a statement on the Qiemo county government's website.

"Ethnic groups are different only in that we have different languages and different customs, but we have the same blue sky above our heads, the same fertile ground beneath our feet, and the same love in our hearts!" Yasen Nasi'er, deputy secretary of the Qiongkule township Communist party committee, told journalists during the announcement on 25 August. "I believe that intermarriage between ethnic groups is a foundation of Chinese culture, and will strengthen the concrete expression of exchange, association, and mingling of all ethnic groups."

Uighur women take care of their children in Xinjiang Province, China Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images AsiaPac

A county official confirmed the policy when reached by phone. "This is meant to promote ethnic unity – that's the main thing," he said.

Xinjiang is China's largest province, a vast sweep of mountains, forests and deserts bordering seven central and south Asian countries, including Afghanistan and India. Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Muslim ethnic group, make up the region's plurality. When Communist troops took control of Xinjiang in 1949, Han Chinese only made up 6% of its total population. Today they make up nearly half.

While ethnic intermarriage is fairly common across China, it is rare between Uighurs and Han Chinese, underscoring the groups' deep-rooted cultural, religious and linguistic differences. The region's cities are often clearly divided along ethnic lines, with Han residents frequenting separate shops and restaurants from their Uighur counterparts.

The region has seen a sharp rise in violent incidents in recent years, including attacks on police stations and government offices, and increasingly, terror attacks in major urban centres. In late May, an attack at a crowded market in the region's capital city, Urumqi, killed 31 people and injured dozens. A month later, nearly 100 people were killed and 215 arrested when knife-wielding mobs rampaged through Shache, a county in Xinjiang's arid south-west, marking the region's worst clash in five years.

State media reports consistently blame the violence on Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists and "separatists", and point to economic growth and preferential ethnic policies as evidence of good regional governance.

Yet the region's 8 million Uighurs complain that the economic growth has mainly benefited the Han Chinese, and that local authorities place severe restrictions on their religious and cultural freedom, including bans on veils, beards and worship at non-state-sanctioned mosques.

Qiemo county's interethnic marriage policy "seems of a piece with general assumptions about Chinese policy in the region, in the sense that the party appears to believe that material incentives can overcome or mediate most political, economic and social problems", said Michael Clarke, an expert on Xinjiang at Griffith University in Australia.

According to the US-based broadcaster Radio Free Asia, Qiemo county officials have counted 57 mixed-race couples within their jurisdiction , in a county with a total population of about 60,000. The policy is experimental, and subject to change.

China also recently began promoting interethnic marriages in Tibet, its other politically recalcitrant ethnic frontier, according to a slew of state media reports published this summer. The Communist party's highest official in the Tibetan region, Chen Quanguo, had himself photographed with a large group of Tibetan-Han mixed-marriage families in mid-June. Interethnic marriages in the region grew from about 700 in 2008 to more than 4,700 last year, according to a report by the research office of the Communist party in Tibet.

"This seems to be part of a much larger effort by the government to essentially socially engineer support for a decidedly Beijing-centric perception of what a society should look like – or at least to minimise objections to the central government's policies," said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.

"It seems to presume that Han will be supportive of government policies – a reality which is manifestly not true – and somehow, that the construct of marriage will promote that political loyalty."

She continued: "It certainly strikes me as one of the perverse efforts by a government that's known to engineer its way out of human rights abuses rather than removing the abusive policies that lead to protests in the first place."