Han

Reporting from the Far West

With our Al Jazeera crew, I visited a part of China that borders Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan, and is populated by a Muslim Turkic ethnic minority known as the Uighurs.

Several decades ago, Uighurs constituted 90 per cent of the population in this area.

But China's economic development has changed Xinjiang's demographics, with Beijing's encouragement that more of the country's majority, the Han Chinese, settle in the region.