THERE IS NO CHINA:

Tracing their ancestry to the sixth century C.E., when they migrated to the Mongolian steppes, the Uyghurs are a Turkic people whose language is closest to Uzbek. Islam is the group's dominant religion; around the 16th century, Uyghur religious leaders founded several Islamic city-states in what was then referred to as East Turkestan. It wasn't until 1884 that the region was made an official province of China and renamed Xinjiang, which translates to "New Frontier."

When the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911, several Uyghur leaders led successful attempts to create independent Muslim republics in western China. But with the rise of the Communist Party in 1949, China officially claimed Xinjiang once more.

The Chinese government has encouraged members of the country's ethnic majority, the Han, to settle in Xinjiang since 1949. At the time, Han Chinese people made up just 6.7 percent of the region's population. By 1978, that number had jumped to 41.6 percent. Today, the 12 million Uyghurs living in Xinjiang still represent a slight majority, but the Han population is in the majority in many cities, including the capital of Urumqi. Though Xinjiang is the largest region in the country and the largest economy among non-coastal provinces, the majority of Uyghurs still live in rural areas and have been largely excluded from this development.

When did China begin its crackdown on Xinjiang?

Muslim Uyghurs have faced prohibitions on their religious and cultural practices since the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. In light of this oppression, Uyghurs began migrating out of the region as early as the 1960s. Periodic calls for Uyghur independence from China gained traction in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the formation of independent Central Asian states like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. No equivalent liberation arrived for the Uyghurs.

The 1990s also marked the beginning of China categorizing Muslim Uyghur activists as terrorists. The country's Communist Party grew increasingly worried after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996. Although several hundred Uyghur fighters in Afghanistan had some relationship with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in 1998, there is little evidence of widespread extremism in Xinjiang, notes scholar Sean Roberts. Fears of domestic attacks increased after 9/11, when the U.S. adopted the rhetoric of the global "War on Terror."

In July 2009, ethnic riots erupted in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi, resulting in the deaths of nearly 200 people and many more injuries. The Chinese government reported that the majority of the dead were Han Chinese, while Uyghur groups claimed that the number of Uyghur casualties was drastically undercounted. Either way, the 2009 event marked a turning point in the Communist Party's behavior toward the Uyghurs, according to Australian scholar Michael Clarke, editor of the forthcoming book The Xinjiang Emergency: Exploring the Causes and Consequences of China's Mass Detention of Uyghurs.

"The hardline taken today builds on historical precedence within the party's governance of Xinjiang," Clarke says. "They've always carried out anti-religious campaigns and controlled ethnic minority cultural expression. What's been different is the intensity and duration of the campaigns to stamp out what they see as being the roots of deviancy."

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