ABSTRACT
Xinjiang is the contested region of north western China that borders on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. With an area of over 1,600,000 square kilometres, almost three times the size of France, it is the largest administrative area in China. It is administered by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Weiwuer zizhiqu. But this is considered to be illegitimate to many of the Uyghur and other non-Han (that is non-Chinese) population, who refer to it as Eastern Turkistan, or Sharqi Türkistan in the Uyghur language. The Uyghurs, after whom the region is named, are the single largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, although their dominance has been threatened by the growing migration of Han Chinese from the east of the PRC since the 1950s. The Uyghurs are a Turkic people who have been Muslims since at least the fifteenth century, and their language is closely related to that of the Uzbeks and distantly to other Turkish languages including Kazakh and Kyrgyz and remotely to the Turkish of Turkey.
