For the Uygurs there are three 'butchers of Xinjiang' - the Kuomintang general who controlled it before world war two, Wang Zhen after 1949 and Wang Lequan. In the name of 'stability' they have lost the hearts of the people.'
So reads one of the opening chapters of the most unusual book written by a mainland Chinese about Xinjiang - Your East Turkestan, My Western Region. It has been selling like hot cakes in the Chinese world since the Urumqi riot on July 5, as people try to make sense of what happened. It is the best exposition in Chinese of the Uygur version of history. Published in Taiwan in October 2007, it is banned on the mainland.
The author is an independent journalist, Wang Lixiong, who carried out research in Xinjiang over nine years. In January 1999 he was imprisoned there for 42 days for 'leaking state secrets'. During this time, he befriended a Uygur intellectual named Mohetaer, who became his passport to the Uygur community, providing access unavailable to most Han Chinese or foreign researchers.
In his version of history Xinjiang is like Palestine, a country belonging to one people, the Uygurs, which is being colonised by another, the Han. Over the past 20 years this process has accelerated, with the arrival of more than two million Han and the marginalisation of the majority of Uygurs.
'I estimate that 5-10 per cent of Uygurs want to remain in China,' Mohetaer said in the book. 'We want an independent state and it is a matter of time,' he said. 'The international environment is unfavourable to us now, but this is temporary. Our moment will come when the economic interests of China conflict with those of the US, Russia and Japan, and the central government will waver. The Western countries and Russia will use democracy as a reason to dismember China.
'Once the civil war begins, 60 per cent of the Han will leave Xinjiang within the first year ... The Han have weapons and we will lose one to two million people. But we will have the support of the Islamic world and 150 million Turkish people,' he said.