Unnecessary evil: China's Muslims aren't terrorists. So why did the Bush administration give Beijing the green light to oppress them?

• Author: Kurlantzick, Joshua

The terrorist attacks of September 11, and the Bush administration's response to them, have unsettled much of the world. But few places have been more profoundly--and negatively,--affected than Xinjiang, an obscure province in Chinas far northwest. Though the name is Chinese, most of the people who live in this Texas-sized swath of rugged mountains and high deserts are Uighurs: Turkic-speaking Muslims, more culturally akin to the Azeris of Baku than the Han Chinese of Beijing.

As in Tibet, the Chinese government has spent decades trying to pacify the land of the Uighurs (pronounced WE-gerz) with a mix of political repression and colonization by Han Chinese. The drab green uniforms of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) have long been a common sight on the province's streets. But since September 11, the Chinese government has sent in 40,000 PLA reinforcements. On a recent visit to the desert city of Hotan, I watched newly arrived Han Chinese soldiers running wind sprints along the side of the road, a practice that the locals in Hotan--where summer midday temperatures top 110 degrees--surely regard as lunacy. In the provincial metropolises of Kashgar and Urumqi, Chinese police patrols wander the streets and lounge conspicuously at the upscale hotels where local Chinese dignitaries gather.

With the beefed-up military presence has come increased cultural and political oppression. During the Muslim festival of Ramadan in 2001, some Uighurs were forbidden to fast and thousands of Uighur-language books were burned in massive rallies throughout the province. More than 3,000 Uighurs reportedly have been secretly jailed since 9/11, and many have been executed for no given reason. Xinjiang province, as Craig Smith recently noted in The New York Times, remains the only place left in China where people are routinely put to death for purely political disagreement. Resentment toward the Beijing government, and indeed toward ethnic Chinese in general, now simmers just below the surface in many Xinjiang households.

The growing repression in Xinjiang is part of the dark side of the Bush administration's response to September 11. By declaring war not just on al Qaeda but also on terrorism generally, the president gave rhetorical cover for other leaders to ratchet up the repression of their own terrorist-infiltrated sub-populations. Ariel Sharon and Vladimir Putin have famously exploited this. But at least Israel and Russia face real, immediate terrorist threats. China faces nothing of the kind from the Uighurs. By any honest reckoning, Xinjiang, though hardly quiescent, is not the hotbed of Islamic militancy that China claims.

Nor are the Uighurs remotely a threat to the United States. Yet in September, the Bush administration declared that a hitherto-unknown Uighur separatist group had ties to al Qaeda. Though there is virtually no serious evidence of such connections (the charge came primarily from the Chinese government), the Bush administration added the group to its terrorist list in the hopes of winning Chinese cooperation in the wider war on terrorism and support for (or at least acquiescence in) an invasion of Iraq. For a critical but still uncertain level of support in the war on terrorism, Washington has given the Chinese government the equivalent of a human rights get, out-of-jail-free card. And China is playing that card ruthlessly.

Little Istanbul

Without setting foot on the ground in Xinjiang it is difficult to grasp how unlike the rest of China this region really is. The scenes I saw walking through the provincial capital of Urumqi reminded me of Istanbul or Amman, not of any city in eastern China. In the city's central market, where Turkish pop music drifts out of a nearby music store, young Uighur men, with their broad, Turkic/Central Asian faces, milled about in long robes and Muslim skullcaps. Nearby, older Uighur women in headscarves and long, flowery frocks sat at tiny streetside cafes, pulling apart dense, Middle Eastern-style sesame bagels. At the entrance to the market, kebab sellers frantically tanned their charcoal grills and cut pieces of shwarma, while dried-fruit vendors hawked their wares at the top of their lungs. Inside, smiling carpet merchants pawed at my arm, inviting me into their stalls to sip tea and view pomegranate-dyed rugs, the Uighurs' most famous handicraft.

A week later, I touched down in Kashgar, one of the major centers of Uighur culture, and home to the Idh Kah mosque, one of the largest religious structures in China and a hotbed for traditional music. As I walked around the outskirts of the mosque, I saw Uighur lute strummers congregating for impromptu performances. That evening, I experienced another permutation of local melodies at a nightclub, watching a young Uighur crooner belt out electrified rock versions of haunting traditional songs. As the music for each tune began, Uighur diners would take to the dance floor in droves, circling their partners with one hand flamboyantly raised above their heads in a style that reminded me of parties in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Uighur culture is traditional but evidences none of the harsh repression of women found in many Muslim countries. Uighur women run businesses, walk the streets in long but still sheer dresses, and interact with men as equals; two teenage girls I met vowed that they would never marry anyone who did not love them.

In almost every...