Dismantling China’s Muslim gulag in Xinjiang is not enough

IMAGINE A PLACE with nearly seven times more land than Britain, oil reserves as big as Iraq’s and more coal than Germany. It produces one-fifth of the world’s cotton. Yet this place is poor. Its income per person is about the same as Botswana’s. And it is a time bomb. Its people mostly belong to two ethnic groups of similar size. One group has all the power and most of the wealth. Many of the other rot in a gulag, enduring compulsory “re-education” in how to think and speak like the richer lot.

Such is the far-western region of Xinjiang (see article). The dominant ethnic group are the Han Chinese, who are more than 90% of China’s population and about 40% of Xinjiang’s. The Communist Party has never trusted a Uighur to run Xinjiang. Han people dominate its economy, too, through massive state-owned industrial and agricultural firms which answer to the government in Beijing, 2,000km (1,200 miles) to the east.