The recent bloody events in West China have drawn attention to a part of the world most of us don't ever give any attention to. We are hot and dry enough without thinking of one of the hottest and driest parts of the world, the high deserts of Xinjiang, the 'New Frontier' region of China.
Recently Australia was asked, and refused, to take some of the Guantanamo detainees who were Uighurs, Muslim activists from this region. This was far too hot an issue for the Chinese, and accepting them would have adversely affected Australian-China relations.
It was probably wise to find them a place other than Australia, one less closely tied economically to China. The Chinese view of Uighur separatism is inevitably far from ours.
Xinjiang, like Tibet, is territory on the fringe of China, under largely indirect Chinese control for many centuries but formally incorporated into China only in the last century. Ethnically, it was non-Chinese, consisting of Uighurs and other formerly nomadic peoples (Kazakhs, Uzbeks etc.). Religiously it was mostly Muslim.
Under both heads, ethnicity and religion, the region posed a problem both to the Nationalists and the Communists. The Uighurs are proud of their heritage, including periods when they ruled part of China proper. They suffered interference with their religion during the Cultural Revolution and since.
Just as in the rest of China, by their very presence the pork-eating Han Chinese create offence to Muslim neighbours, even to those for whom Islam is more a cultural than a religious identity. It is worth noting that Hui-hui, the Chinese identification of Muslims, is regarded officially as an ethnic rather than a religious label.
The Chinese government rightly fears that the mosques are centres of resistance to Chinese rule. Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the establishment of Islamic republics just across the border, Islamicist ideas have spread into China and become a focus and magnifying factor for more mundane resentments created by insensitive officials and police and by the ever growing migration of Han Chinese into the area.
Technically, the region, the largest province in China but with the smallest population density, is a special region for minorities, the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region. But with China's population explosion, and particularly the development of Xinjiang's oil and mineral resources (some 80 per cent of China's total) there has been a huge migration of specialist workers and job seekers from China's eastern and southern provinces.