ChinaThe Great Leap west

The “Hanification” of Xinjiang province

IDH KAH Mosque, a towering structure in central Kashgar, the westernmost city in China's vast province of Xinjiang, has always been a prime meeting place for Uighurs, the Muslim Turkic people who historically dominated Xinjiang. The square outside the mosque, venerated in Uighur writing and song, used to look like Amman or Tashkent, full of skullcap-wearing Muslim men, vendors selling Arabic CDs, and kebab sellers carving hunks of fatty lamb from steaming carcasses.

These days, though, the area increasingly resembles Shanghai or Shenzhen. In the old city of Kashgar, Uighurs sit out in front of their ancient mud-brick homes and watch Chinese building workers dig huge ditches in front of their doors in preparation for their destruction. Chinese firms are razing traditional homes near the mosque—without, the Uighurs complain, paying anything close to decent compensation—in order to build flashy new shopping centres and apartments catering to the ethnic Chinese who are flooding in to Kashgar. For decades the government in Beijing has relocated Han Chinese to Xinjiang to dilute Uighur influence over the restive province, which before 1949 was briefly an independent state. But until recently most Chinese migrants went to Xinjiang's east, which had fewer Uighur people. Now, with the construction of a new railway and an oil pipeline to western Xinjiang, and large state subsidies there for Chinese contractors, the Chinese are encroaching on areas, such as Kashgar, that the Uighurs consider their cultural heartland. Combined with a crackdown on Uighur political and religious activity, this has made Xinjiang an edgy place.

The shift in Xinjiang's population is striking. China's most recent census showed the Han Chinese population rising twice as quickly in Xinjiang as the Uighur population. And these figures do not take into count the tens of thousands of Chinese “migrant workers” who come to Xinjiang for building jobs and never leave. This shift is obvious on the ground. Large sections of southern Kashgar, situated around the Wenzhou Hotel (Wenzhou is a city in eastern China), are filled with Chinese-owned businesses, many of which reportedly get help from local officials when competing with Uighur firms. Homes and offices for Chinese are springing up throughout Kashgar over the rubble of Uighur buildings.

Meanwhile, since September 11th 2001, Beijing has tried to link Uighur nationalist groups to al-Qaeda, even announcing that around 1,000 Uighurs trained with Osama bin Laden's organisation. A few Uighurs did indeed fight for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but most support non-violence, and there is little evidence of significant al-Qaeda links. Yet America at first played along with Beijing's fiction, placing an obscure Uighur group on its list of international terror groups, a designation China used to tar all Uighurs as terrorists. (China now defines a terrorist in Xinjiang as anyone who thinks “separatist thoughts”.) Under this pretext, China has over the past two years detained tens of thousands of people in Xinjiang—and executed many of them, according to Amnesty International. The authorities in Beijing recently said that this crackdown would continue indefinitely.

All this does not bode well for Xinjiang's future. Uighurs report that small-scale clashes break out nearly every day between Chinese and Uighurs in Xinjiang's western cities. The instability scares off foreign investors—foreign oil firms have pulled out of the pipeline project—which might be more willing to employ Uighurs than Chinese state companies are. And moderate Uighurs, who want autonomy but not necessarily independence, worry that repression and Chinese immigration are playing into the hands of the most hardline, conservative elements in Uighur society. Though the Uighurs historically were among the world's most liberal and pro-western Muslims, fundamentalist Islam is gaining sway among young Uighur men.

Still, there is hope. Recognising the threat posed by hardliners, the leading moderate Uighur diaspora organisations, which used to spend most of their time squabbling, came together at a conference in Germany in April to unite behind one leader, Erkin Alptekin. The Uighurs hope that Mr Alptekin, the son of a pre-1949 president of independent Xinjiang, can become their Dalai Lama, promoting the Uighur cause in the West and serving as a moderate, unifying force for their nation. Even some American officials are beginning to realise that China's definition of “terrorism” simply means anyone who opposes Beijing. When Mr Alptekin visited Washington earlier this summer, he was feted by congressional staffers, while the National Endowment for Democracy, which gets funding from Congress, has recently given a grant to a moderate Uighur exile group in America.

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