The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a remote province, 2,000 miles from Beijing. I visited many times between 2007 and 2013, staying in Uyghur villages and cities on the edge of the Taklamakan desert. The landscape changed on each visit – historic Uyghur neighborhoods were being torn down and rebuilt as modern Chinese cities, a result of government development policy. Uyghurs moved from houses with shaded courtyards into apartments, and more and more Han Chinese filled the streets, drawn by jobs in schools, construction, and companies extracting natural resources from the land. In 2009, there...