The Chinese need to realise that they have to co-opt the Uighurs. Attempting to stamp them out in the manner seen in 2008 and 2009 will lead to further radicalisation. Beijing should remember that the Chechens constitute only 0.94 per cent of the Russian population and jihadists there move at will in an area the size of Wales. The greatest mistake the Uighurs can make is to retreat deeper into Islamic radicalism when their future ultimately depends on winning over the minds of urban Chinese in the eastern cities on moral grounds that real autonomy deserves to exist in Xinjiang and Tibet.

Journeys to the West have always featured prominently in Chinese culture as moral allegories of self-discovery, most notably the Chinese folk tale Monkey published during the Ming dynasty, concerning the mythological journey of the Buddhist monk Xuanzuang through what is now Xinjiang to India in search of the sutras. 

In his memoirs, the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng describes finding himself on a train to Xinjiang in the Gansu corridor, heading west to spread the gospel of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. "When our train stopped at a station in the Gansu Corridor, a woman with a dirty face and long, loose hair came forward in a group of beggars," Wei wrote. "She stood begging below the window of my compartment, together with several teenagers. I leaned out of the window to hold out a few buns, but instantly fell back, because I saw something I could never have imagined: the woman with long, loose hair was a girl of 18 and her body was naked. What I had thought were clothes were coal dust and mud that covered her body. The naked girl stood on tiptoe and stretched her arms up towards me, her eyes imploring me. I couldn't understand her dialect but I knew she still wanted food. Perhaps she had lost out in the scramble for what I had tossed down the first time. I gave my last buns to her. I was relieved when the train pulled out of the station. But the sight of the girl haunted me constantly."

China is still running from the agonised hunger of its immediate past. The Chinese people have backed a project that drives breakneck development despite the environment, despite democracy and despite the Tibetans and Uighurs. Without Xinjiang, China cannot become a superpower. Therefore there is as much chance of her letting it go as there is of Russia relinquishing Siberia, or America the states west of the Rockies. Perhaps some day the Chinese will wake up to the issue of ethnic minority rights in the same way the United States rediscovered native Americans in the 1960s — but by then the Uighur will have become the Sioux of Central Asia.