Spot the odd one out: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Xinjiang. Since the unravelling of the Soviet Union and the birth of the Central Asian republics, the vast swathe of China known as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region has seemed a cartographic anomaly. "Uighurstan" has never been on the cards for the ethnic-Turkic Muslims of the region, who now make up slightly under half its 20m population. But Communist Party officials in Beijing have nevertheless fretted about the linked threats of extremist Islam and secession. Vicious race riots this week in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, have caused the deaths of over 150 people and shown just what a hash the regime has made of fostering stability.

The bloodiest known incident of unrest in China since the massacre that ended the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 embarrassed China's president, Hu Jintao, into skipping the G8 summit in Italy. That is not surprising. Though distant from Beijing, the unrest in Xinjiang calls into question basic assumptions about China made by both the government and foreign investors: that Chinese citizens are ready to trade political dignity and fairness for economic progress and wealth; and that irrational forces, such as religion and ethnic nationalism, are distractions that can be bludgeoned away to enable the smooth technocratic transformation of society.

You're no Dalai Lama, Ms Kadeer

The Uighurs' plight is like that of the Tibetans: unfairness is not a side issue. Like the anti-Chinese riots last year in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, the savagery in Urumqi shows that modernisation does not always dampen resentment against Chinese rule. For both the Uighurs and the Tibetans, economic development has been inseparable from immigration by ethnic-Han Chinese, 92 per cent of China's population. But the two minorities present very different problems for the Beijing regime.

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