I found these other passages interesting too:

“His familiarity with the oil industry may have played a role in his transfer to Xinjiang, an oil-rich region. But he made his mark there by combining relentless economic development with punishing social policies to remake Turkic Xinjiang in Han China’s image.

“Mr. Wang arrived in Xinjiang as the Soviet Union was dissolving, its central Asian pieces shedding their colonial chains. Millions of Han citizens transplanted by Mao after China’s army occupied the region in 1949 were leaving. Beijing feared that Xinjiang’s growing Muslim Uighur population would try to follow its Soviet neighbors into independence.

“Mr. Wang’s antidote was a heavy dose of modernization for the ancient Uighur culture. He opened the region’s oil and gas fields to drilling, laid pipelines east to the Chinese heartland and west to Kazakhstan, and turned the Production and Construction Corps, a creaky make-work project for mustered-out Han soldiers, into a moneymaker listed on the Shanghai stock exchange.

“Han workers began flowing back, lured by industry and government jobs that Uighurs say were disproportionately parceled out to Han migrants. During the 1990s, Mr. Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said, about two million Han relocated to Xinjiang.

“At the same time, Mr. Wang tightly constrained Uighur culture and religion. He substituted Mandarin for Uighur in primary schools, saying minority languages were ‘out of step with the 21st century,’ and banned or restricted Islamic practices among government workers, including the wearing of beards and head scarves and rituals like fasting and praying while on the job.

“Yet Mr. Wang’s efforts intensified after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Within months, he began a campaign against terrorism and separatism that he linked to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a little-known Uighur group. The Bush administration agreed, adding the group to its list of allies of Al Qaeda in 2002.”

Not a dose of criticism there at all, despite the blatant efforts to wipe out the Uighurs’ language and severely restrict their religion. Wow! And as for the Bush connection, it’s widely believed, amongst those who have studied the Guantanamo Uighurs’ cases, that designating the ETIM as a terrorist organization was designed to ensure Chinese support — or, at least, a lack of opposition — in the UN in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

As for the U.S. media on Xinjiang, I don’t even know what to make of this article from the New York times(H/T http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/6264)
A Strongman in China’s Ethnic Strife
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/asia/11xinjiang.html

“The government media may call this week’s rioting the worst outbreak of ethnic violence in recent Chinese history, killing at least 184 and injuring more than 1,000. But Mr. Wang is fully able to knock out the evildoers. He did so in 1997, quelling riots in Yining, near the Kazakhstan border, at a cost in lives that remains unknown.

Iron fist and velvet glove, he has suppressed Islam, welcomed industry, marginalized the Uighur language, built roads and rail links to the outside world, and spied on, arrested and jailed countless minority citizens in the name of stopping terrorism and subsuming Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) into a greater China.

Even his detractors allow that he has done a masterful job. His nickname is “the stability secretary” — a tribute to his ability to step into chaos and haul it to order.”

Dysfunctional journalism, fascist paean or tongue in cheek? I can’t even tell, because I don’t know much about the writer. I wonder how many of the “facts” are really stenographic journalism. The end of the 2nd page is also interesting as well since it suggests a connection between Bush and Chinese authorities.