When I first met Rebiya Kadeer in 1998 she was a slim, dignified woman surrounded by fawning Chinese officials eager to hang on the coattails of the most successful Uighur entrepreneur in the country.

Her business empire — she started with a laundry service — represented the success of Beijing’s policies to assimilate and encourage Uighurs. But within a year she was in jail, serving more than five years behind bars after being convicted of providing state secrets to foreigners.

She was freed in 2005 just before a visit by Condoleezza Rice, then US Secretary of State, presumably to avert pressure for her release while Ms Rice was in town. She was then swiftly deported and sent into exile in the US. The tale of Ms Kadeer, who is aged 58 and is the mother of 11 children, is a classic rags-to-riches saga and details of her dramatic life appear in her recently published memoir, Dragon Fighter, available now in Britain. In the book she recounts her transformation from tycoon to Xinjiang’s most prominent dissident and even contender for the Nobel Peace Prize.

At the height of her success in China her wealth was estimated at 270 million yuan (£24 million) based on her trading firm, a department store, property investments, interests in a leather factory in neighbouring Kazakhstan and a store in Uzbekistan.

But she somehow fell foul of the authorities — possibly over suspicions involving the activities of her husband, who was living in the US and made no secret of his support for Xinjiang’s independence. She was arrested and stripped of her once prestigious position on one of China’s top advisory bodies. Many members of her family still live in Xinjiang and several came under pressure from the authorities in the run-up to last year’s Olympic Games as the security forces sought to quell potential unrest.

Ms Kadeer complained that police had herded her two sons, Ablikim, 32, and Alim Abdiriyim, 30, and her daughter, Rushangul, 36, as well as their spouses and children into a truck and taken them to a campsite where they were beaten. All three were then placed under house arrest. China denies the accusations.

She has now been accused of being the mastermind behind the latest violence in her native region, known by independence activists as East Turkestan.

Ms Kadeer, who heads the World Uighur Congress (WUC) denied those charges yesterday.

The WUC said she had played no part in what it called a protest, before adding: “We ask Chinese leaders to change their six-decade-long heavy-handed policies of forced assimilation and cultural genocide imposed upon the peaceful Uighur people and seek to resolve the East Turkestan question through peaceful dialogue.”

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