China's objectives in Xinjiang

China is nervously looking forward to hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics, and is ensuring that nothing spoils the global publicity surrounding the event. As such, an incident in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on 11 May does not bode well for those hopes. A protester threw an incendiary device at a large portrait of Mao Zedong hung over the gate leading to the Forbidden City. The last time the portrait was defaced was during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations.

Police immediately arrested the culprit; Xinhua news agency reported that the protester, Gu Haiou, was a 35-year-old unemployed man from Urumqi, the capital of China's restive Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The Chinese government consistently portrays protesters in Xinjiang as terrorists. The province is increasingly important to China's ambitious economic plans; however, the government has yet to devise a policy to deal with nationalist aspirations among the province's 8.5 million Uighurs, an ethnic Muslim Turkic population and one of China's 55 officially recognised ethnic minorities.

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) was established in 1955, four years after Beijing established its control over the territory; nevertheless, it has resisted incorporation into the People's Republic. Chinese control put paid to the brief period of an independent 'East Turkistan Republic', based in Gulja, which lasted only from 1941-45, when China was fighting for survival against Japan. While Beijing's official stance is that China has had sovereignty over Xinjiang 'since ancient times' (zigu yilai), most specialists acknowledge that China has exerted at least marginal sovereignty over the region since 1759, despite periodic uprisings.

The province, comprising one-sixth of China's territory, is larger than the UK, France, Italy and Germany combined and, in a major security concern for Beijing, has frontiers with neighbouring Central Asian states Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, as well as southern Asian states Pakistan, India and Eurasia's dominant state, Russia.

For years, China has pursued a relentless public relations campaign vilifying nationalist-minded Uighurs in Xinjiang as terrorists, a charge disputed by human rights organisations, which allege that China cynically abuses international willingness to counter terrorism in order to continue its efforts to suppress Uighur nationalism. In August 2006, Chinese police officials announced that since 1990 they have seized 41 tonnes of explosives from Xinjiang separatists.

The uncomfortable fact for Beijing is that the Uighur are ethnically Turkic and converted to Islam from the 10th century. The prevalent form of Islam in Xinjiang is Sunni, with widespread Sufi practices. Local authorities have banned Sufi zikr ceremonies as well as books by Sufi authors, while Chinese scholars maintain that Sufism is a degenerate form of Islam. During the 19th century, the Sufi brotherhoods strongly resisted Chinese and Russian encroachment into Xinjiang and Central Asia. In marked contrast to Chinese policy, in the post-Soviet Central Asian states Sufism is frequently encouraged by the government, as the indigenous Sufi forms of Islam are seen as effective alternatives to fundamentalism, particularly Salafism.

It was the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in the US that greatly strengthened Beijing's hand in dealing with its restive Uighur population, allowing the Chinese government to link them to Al-Qaeda. While on 1 September 2001 Abdulahat Abdurixit, Chairman of the XUAR regional government, said in Urumqi: "By no means is Xinjiang a place where violence and terrorist incidents take place very often." Two months after the 11 September attacks, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman said that "several hundred Uighur separatists" had been trained in Al-Qaeda-affiliated camps in Afghanistan. Beijing asserted, while advancing no real evidence, that more than 1,000 Uighurs had travelled to Afghanistan to train with Al-Qaeda while Amnesty International reported in March 2002 that "thousands" of Uighur in Xinjiang were rounded up in the aftermath of the attacks in the US. 621 of 2,236 words