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Notes
1. The author would like to thank members of the Griffith Asia Institute's “China Policy Project” for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper, and Mr Liu Xian for his translation of Chinese sources.
2. Xinjiang, in the far northwest of China, is China's largest administrative unit, accounts for one-sixth of its total territory, shares borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia, and is populated by 13, predominantly Turkic-Muslim, ethnic groups. The 13 officially recognised ethnic groups of Xinjiang are the Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uzbek, Hui, Mongol, Tartar, Russian, Solon, Xibo, Manchu and Han.
3. There are 56 officially recognised ethnic groups or minzu in China, including the majority Han (Mackerras, Citation2004a).
4. Between 1911 and 1949 Xinjiang was dominated by independent Han “warlords” and experienced major Soviet influence. However, the Uighur and other ethnic groups established two nascent independent states – the Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (TIRET) in 1933–34 and the East Turkestan Republic (ETR) in 1944–49 (Forbes, Citation1986; Wang, Citation1999).
5. The issue of population transfers to ethnic minority regions has been particularly evident in ongoing controversies regarding Chinese policy towards Tibet, although recent research suggests that such claims have been over-stated by Tibetan exile organisations (Suatman, 2006). In the context of Xinjiang, the claim that the Uighur and other ethnic groups were being diluted by Han in-migration has also been evident for some decades. In Xinjiang the dynamic of Han in-migration to the region has undergone fluctuations, generally correlated to changing state policies. For example, the Han proportion of the population actually fell during the 1980s, from 40.45 per cent in 1982 to 37.58 per cent in 1990, with the relaxation of the coercive population transfers of the Maoist period. This proportion then rose substantially to 40.6 per cent in 2000 as the state's program of economic reform and development encouraged Han in-migration (Mackerras, Citation2001; Becquelin, Citation2004).
6. For an account of the fate of the Uighurs released from Guatanamo Bay, and their alleged connections to Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan see Cloud & Johnson, Citation2004.