But surely China has done some good? He bats away the question. You can tell by the way he refuses to answer that he doesn't want to admit that China's roads, schools, hospitals, TVs, computers and factories have brought modernity to Kashgar — a foreign occupier's modernity but modernity all the same. Later that day, a bomb explodes in the Xinjiang city of Aktu, killing seven people. 

Urumqi today is Kashgar tomorrow. It is overwhelmingly Han. Fewer than 25 per cent of those who live in Xinjiang's capital are Uighur. Proud avenues lined with cutesy fencing and conventional glass towers create a city centre a world apart from the Uighur villages and semi-nomadic Kazakh churls in the countryside. Crowds are watching a catwalk in an air-conditioned shopping centre. Couples are turning up for lunch at the trendiest restaurant in town, Pizza Hut, having booked well in advance. There is not an Uighur in sight. 

The scene reminds me of Engels's descriptions of Manchester in The Conditions of the Working Class in England. The roads are an optical illusion hiding squalid back streets lined with hundreds of greasy-bowl noodle places, prostitutes sitting on stools, rivers of raw sewage and elderly women selling their possessions on the pavement. Urumqi — renamed Wulumuqi by the Han — lives in drab, chipped but functional housing. As little as 20 years ago the place was recognisably a Uighur town. Now, hardly any signs can be seen in their Arabic script. 

Wulumuqi is frightened. Starting in August last year, as many as 476 Han claimed to have been stabbed with syringes by Uighur separatists. Terrified thousands took to the streets to protest against the authorities' perceived failure to stop the attackers. However, a six-person Chinese Army medical team announced that it believed many of those who claimed to have been stabbed were hallucinating. 

Instead, they suggested they had fallen victim to pervasive fear and medical ignorance. Syringe attacks continued to be reported, with as many as 77 being noted on September 8 and 9, leading to the resignation of the communist city chief. Real or imaginary, the hypodermic needle strikes underscore the depths of trauma and ethnic discord after the riots. 

The Uighurs and the Han need each other but have yet to realise it. For the Uighurs, the only thing worse than "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" would be to become a wasteland of Islamism with various foreign powers intervening to capture precious resources. Real autonomy within China would enable the Uighurs to be both themselves and wealthy. East Turkestan alone would probably be just as successful as Kyrgyzstan.