My journey to China’s
westernmost province began this May in the backroom of an ordinary brasserie in
one of Paris’s eastern suburbs. The Uyghur man I had come to see was
accompanied by a plainclothes policeman, but even so, his hands trembled and
there was a look of fear in his eyes: had I really come to interview him or was
I in the pay of the Chinese political police? He was a member of the dissident
World Uyghur Congress and had just been granted political asylum in France. His was a run-of-the-mill
story: he had protested about an injustice at his workplace in Xinjiang, which
led to him being arrested and imprisoned. After that he had fled. That was all
he would say. His fear of being tracked to a Paris suburb may seem excessive
but it’s indicative of the moral and physical pressure facing the Uyghurs,
China’s Turkic-speaking Muslims.A few days later, I arrived in
Urumqi, the capital of the vast Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, which
is nearly 4,000km from Beijing. There were no immediate signs of tension, even
in the city’s Uyghur district. Here, members of the region’s Muslim minorities –
Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Kirghiz – coexist with Han Chinese, who are the largest
group in the city (though not throughout the Xinjiang region) as they are in
China as a whole. Some Han families have lived here for several generations.