A little more than a week before September 11, officials from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region were telling foreign investors about the merits of China's far northwest.
'By no means is Xinjiang a place where violence and terrorist accidents take place very often,' the party chairman of Xinjiang boasted on September 2, adding the situation there was 'better than ever in history'.
A lot can happen in the space of a week. Nine days later, in the wake of the terrorist attacks that shook the United States, China was suddenly urging international support for its fight against rampant terrorism in Xinjiang, home to some 9 million Uygur Muslims.
China argued that forces in Xinjiang were connected to international terrorism, and were the recipient of direct financing from Osama bin Laden and the Taleban. Chinese officials also stated that the 'Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM)' was a 'major component of the terrorist network headed by Osama Bin Laden'.
'Before 9/11, Xinjiang officials said there were no terrorists there,' says Dru Gladney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute and an expert on Xinjiang. 'Suddenly 9/11 arrived and there was a major terrorist problem.'
According to a report last year by Human Rights in China (HRIC), Beijing was quick to position its repression of Uygurs as part of the global war on terror, playing up the fact that some Uygurs were captured in Afghanistan fighting alongside the Taleban.