I didn't want to write this from China. I'm not really paranoid or self-important enough to think the Chinese government was hanging on my every blogged word, but they do randomly check things, and I didn't want to get my traveling companions or anyone else in trouble. Remember, I'm the one who had a glitch in my visa application because I was dumb enough to put "writer" in the "occupation" box.

Xinjiang Province, where we spent the most time on this trip, sits north of Tibet and is larger. Its people are mostly Uighur, the largest of China's 50+ ethnic minorities. They're Muslims, Turkic people related most closely to Kazakhs (no, not Cossacks), Kurds, and other dwellers in the "stans," which by the way means "mountains." The Kurdish Mountains, the Krygyz Mountains, the Turkmen Mountains... get it? What the Uighurs don't want to be is Chinese. For about five minutes of history, Xinjiang was referred to as "East Turkestan," and that's what the Uighur separatist movement wants it to be again. When our local guide, a handsome, animated, funny young man, spoke of "my nation," China was not what he meant.

He needed to tread a fine line, though. We had a national guide with us, too. Guides are hired through private companies now, not the government anymore, and you're free to travel without one if you want; but the national guide, or any one of us for that matter, could have been working for the government on the side -- okay, a spy -- or have just taken offense at too much Uighur nationalism. Uighur nationalism was responsible for three incidents this past March alone: a hijacking attempt on the Urumqi-Beijing flight (the flight we took in May) by a woman with liquid explosives who was apparently planning to blow the plane up mid-air; a pile of weapons found in Xi'an that were on their way to Beijing to interrupt the Olympic opening ceremonies; and an odd incident in Kashgar involving the arrest of a couple of dozen "illegal Christians," that is, people practicing a brand of Christianity not officially sanctioned by the Chinese government. What was odd about that was that Uighurs being mostly Moslems, the separatist movement generally has loose ties to Islamist movements in the stans and the middle east. But it proves the movement is about being Uighur, not about being Moslem.

But it's about something else, too: oil. Xinjiang is between China and middle eastern oil. We were on a difficult two-lane road up by the border with Pakistan, but that won't last. China's building a major highway that will connect the coast to the middle east and, effectively, Europe. There's supposedly oil under Xinjiang, too, and mineral wealth in the mountains. The Chinese aren't going to give this province up any time soon. What they are doing, is moving Han Chinese to Xinjiang with promises of jobs, housing, etc. The Uighurs feel this is an attempt to dilute Uighur culture, and of course they're right. The tension between the Hans and the Uighurs is palpable in places like Turpan, which used to be very heavily Uighur and is now half Han.

So the Chinese government won't give in, and the separatist movement will go on. Why the government doesn't do the really smart thing and co-opt the Uighurs by offering to return a larger-than-expected share of the wealth of the province to them as it's extracted, I don't know. Except that like most governments, their instinct is to be rock, not water. Though in the end, water will always win.