Until dawn on Monday, when the peace of the city of Kashgar was broken by explosions, it would have been easy to believe in the Chinese Government’s version of the happy land of Xinjiang. The name means New Frontier, a vast area of desert and mountains remote even to most Chinese, with all the trappings of an archetypal mysterious East.

Camels still trudge through the desert along the old Silk Route and white jade is bought and sold in bazaars beneath the minarets of tiled mosques. Forty-seven races live in Xinjiang — foremost among them the Uighurs, a people who look more like Afghans than ethnic Chinese. Every one of them, according to officials, is a loyal and patriotic citizen of the People’s Republic.

“Chinese policies have won the support of all the ethnic peoples,” Shi Dagang, a senior Communist Party official in Kashgar, said yesterday. “The people fully support the Government and the leadership of the Communist Party.”

The events of the previous morning, and the experience of talking to people in Xinjiang, suggested that this was far from the truth.

It was not the ferocity of the attack that was so ominous for the Government so much as its desperation. Two Uighur men killed 16 Chinese policemen and injured 16 others with a crashed lorry, homemade bombs and knives. They expected to die; they left wills full of talk of holy war. Although they were taken alive it does not make it any less of a suicide attack: as the murderers of policemen they can expect a swift trial and execution. “There are so many people, so many, who feel like those men did, and who have sympathy for their actions,” a young Uighur in Kashgar said. “Once the Uighurs used to be a strong people, but now we have no power even here in our own home.”

Ethnically, Uighurs are a Turkic race whose homeland is at the meeting point of Asia and Europe. The area now called Xinjiang was annexed by the Chinese Empire in the 19th century, although it achieved independence briefly in the late 1940s before the Communist victory in China in 1949.

Separatist sentiment has always been present but the censorship and political repression of the Chinese Government have prevented it from forming a large-scale organisation. Small groups operated in secret but began to make their presence felt in the 1990s after the liberation of the former Soviet republics and the increasing dominance of ethnic Chinese.

In 1949 the Han Chinese made up 6 per cent of the population of Xinjiang; today they represent 41 per cent in a population of 19 million, compared with 45 per cent Uighur.

“It is obvious that their main goal is assimilation of the Uighur people,” said one Uighur man who, like the other people interviewed, asked not to be identified. “They want to absorb us and our culture into China.”

China pays lip service to freedom of religion for Muslim Uighurs but only under its own terms. Imams must be licensed by the State. Public servants, including teachers, are barred from worshipping at mosques and no one under 18 is allowed to worship or to receive religious instruction. To many Uighurs this represents an attempt to snuff out their religion over several generations by ensuring that young people grow up fully secularised.

A series of attacks and demonstrations culminated in bus bombings in 1997 in the provincial capital, Urumqi, which, until Monday, was the biggest act of political violence in the province. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, China identified itself as a victim of international terrorism and Uighur separatists as a threat — Uighur Chinese were captured in Afghanistan and incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay.

Uighur restiveness has reached new heights in the extended build-up to the Olympics, however. The Chinese authorities have announced a number of arrests, including a raid on a training camp run by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement in January last year. This year 82 alleged terrorists were arrested, according to officials.

Human rights organisations insisted that the Chinese anti-terror campaign had blurred the lines between genuine men of violence and those who peacefully supported independence.

“The repressive aspects are driving people to take more radical action,” Nicholas Bequelin, of Human Rights Watch, said. “If publishing a book about independence makes you a ‘terrorist’, then why not put a bomb in a police station?”

Officials said that the weapons recovered by police at the scene of this week’s attack were similar to those found last year in raids on a training base of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. The group is reportedly based along China’s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan and linked to al-Qaida and to Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist group that originated in the Middle East in the 1950s.

Times Recommends

• UN may halt 400-year-old 'freedom of the seas'
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone
• Gas deal on hold, but Ukraine may pay in the end