Pilgrims' Progress.(World Affairs; ASIA)(Uighurs' unrest)

Byline: Jonathan Ansfield; With Melinda Liu, Wang Zhenru and Mary Hennock in Beijing

China offers its minorities wealth and worldliness--and that's just what's driving the ethnic protests.

As turmoil erupted in Tibet and Xinjiang recently, China's leaders seemed genuinely confused. After all, many of the protesters had prospered under Chinese rule--so why were they biting the hands that fed them?

China's military began settling Xinjiang--home to about 8 million Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims--in the 1950s, and in the '80s, Beijing began integrating the Uighurs by relaxing migration and trade barriers. State-owned enterprises set up petroleum bases and pipelines. Coastal Han Chinese flowed in, opening factories and mom-and-pop shops. China built highways and rail links, promoted local tourism and subsidized many Uighurs' housing and education. And the region boomed: from 2001 to 2006, average annual per capita income doubled, from about $950 to $1,900. Yet opposition to Chinese rule didn't diminish--leaving Beijing wondering why.

The answer is that bigger incomes and more access to travel and technology have taught once isolated minorities that, while they may be better off, the Han among them and in China's bustling coastal provinces are doing better still. While incomes in Xinjiang were doubling overall, studies show they remained much lower in heavily Uighur areas than in those parts of the region dominated by Han Chinese. Improved circumstances also allowed Uighurs to travel in larger numbers--and come home demanding the kind of rights their fellow Muslims enjoy abroad.

Such sentiments may now be coming to a boil. On April 10, Chinese security officials claimed to have foiled a Uighur plot to kidnap Olympic athletes and other visitors during the Games. The previous month, authorities said they had thwarted two other Xinjiang Olympic plots--one to blow up an aircraft. Whether the Uighur terrorist threat is real or exaggerated remains a topic of heated debate. But ordinary Uighurs, like Tibetans, still feel a palpable sense of grievance. That's partly due to the recent emergence of a class of Uighur businessmen known as hajjis: those who have made the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. Beijing has been allowing these trips since the 1980s, and most of the pilgrims "come back with greatly enhanced authority and new ideas about Islam," says Dru Gladney, an ...