As Chinese security forces reimpose order after a bloody spasm of ethnic unrest in Xinjiang, Turkey is finding itself in the line of fire.The country's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, helped ensure this by suggesting that the recent violence in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi involved "genocide".
Many Urumqi residents believe the new arrivals, though kitted out as members of China's paramilitary police force, include regular army troops.
Just one flight a day takes off from Xining, the capital of Qinghai, to Urumqi.
It stretches 1,776km from Lanzhou, the capital of the western province of Gansu, to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, an "autonomous region" bordering on Central Asia.
Few talk of the possible delights of sitting on a bullet train for eight hours between Urumqi and Lanzhou.
In one stretch, affected by gale-force winds 250 days of the year, the bullet train will pass through a concrete tunnel built to protect it.Of the three provinces traversed by the line, Xinjiang has the most reason to celebrate, its excitement evident in the building of a colossal airport-style bullet-train station just outside Urumqi, with a vast new development zone around it.
A day earlier police killed five people in a raid on a "holy-war training group" in the region's capital, Urumqi.
The ruling by a court in Urumqi, the capital of his native region of Xinjiang, was the harshest known sentence in years for someone convicted of a non-violent political crime in China.
Their message, not the government's, seems to rule in places like Urumqi.
But Wang Lequan, the Communist Party chief of China's western region of Xinjiang, reportedly suffered just such an indignity in the region's capital, Urumqi, on September 3rd.
THE new high-speed railway line to Urumqi climbs hundreds of metres onto the Tibetan plateau before slicing past the valley where the Dalai Lama was born.
