Eight hundred dead and over three thousand wounded, the death penalty announced for those revolting, the closure of the mosques in Urumqi to avoid disorder and the prohibition to gather for Friday prayers. The balance of the repression that has taken place in the Xinjiang is extremely serious, and, bearing witness to the seriousness of recent events, President Hu Jintao unexpectedly decided not to attend the G8+5 and return to Beijing. These events originated in a misunderstanding; the mistaken idea that a number of Muslim labourers had raped two Han women (China’s main ethnic group) resulted in clashes during which two Uyghurs were killed. This resulted in a series of violently repressed demonstrations after the intervention of thousands of men from the People’s Armed Police Force, but was above all the spark that emphasised the problem of the lack of integration between the Uyghur people and the Chinese.

The difficult coexistence between these two ethnic groups present in the Xinjiang, a region in north-western China, has been a thorn in the flesh for the Chinese authorities just as Tibet is. This is an even more important problem, less know to the international community, considering that it involves about twenty million people of which eight million are Uyghurs, the main Turkish speaking and Muslim ethnic group in the country. Chinese Muslims have tried to preserve their ethnic and religious identity as much as possible, professing their faith and passing down their ethnic and religious identity. They have managed to keep such a distance from the rest of the Chinese people that they have preserved their original features. Although they are not considered a real danger by the authorities, the Communist Party has always tried to repress all movements of Islamic origin, fearing interference in the country’s political and economic life, alternating however periods of tolerance so as to avoid revolts.

The Cultural Revolution coincided with a period of repression for believers in any religion and in 1966 Mao Tse Tung ordered the confiscation of all land owned by Muslims and the destruction of all mosques. During the Eighties, Deng Xiaoping implemented a number of reforms that resulted in a degree of liberalisation for religions. Although it became possible to believe in the Islamic religion, in practice it was impossible to worship and Imams were obliged to swear total loyalty to the Communist Party. The Nineties instead saw a series of clashes and violent conflicts between the Chinese authorities and the supporters of independence for the Xinjiang, such as the Baren revolt or the bombs in Urumqi that caused dozens to die. The situation deteriorated after 9/11 2001 when the Chinese leaders started to accuse Muslim ethnic groups of being “terrorists, separatists and extremists”. In spite of this, for financial reasons Beijing cannot afford to lose the Xinjiang region and there is a constant ‘Chinese-isation’ of the population.

The autonomous Uyghur Region of Xinjiang, as it was renamed in 1955, is in fact rich in gas, oil and minerals. Although exploitation poses problems due to the climate and the morphological conditions, natural resources could be used by the region’s neighbouring countries such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. For China, the Uyghurs’ inclination to have closer ties with central Asia due to cultural and ideological reasons, represents the possible loss of a strategic area for future commercial development. So Beijing incentivises the presence of the Han in this region and, simultaneously, tends to remove the children born to Muslim families and educate them as if they were Chinese, so as to implement a gradual process involving the uprooting of their culture of origin.

Translated by Francesca Simmons