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China’s repressive policy towards its Islamic fringe has badly backfired

There was no Islamic extremism in China until Beijing inadvertently created it, according to Nick Holdstock’s measured history of the Uighurs of Xinjiang

1 August 2015

9:00 AM

1 August 2015

9:00 AM

China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State Nick Holdstock

I.B. Tauris, pp.288, £14.99, ISBN: 9781784531409

In October 2013, a jeep ploughed through a crowd of pedestrians on the edge of Tiananmen Square, crashed and burst into flames, killing five people. The authorities identified the driver as Uighur, a member of an Islamic ethnic minority hailing from China’s northwest region of Xinjiang. Six months later, eight knife-wielding Uighurs rampaged through a packed railway station in Kunming in southwest China, killing 29 people and wounding more than 140 others — an attack described by the national media as ‘China’s 9/11’.

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Tom Miller is the author of China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History.

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