Three hundred Chinese citizens, members of the country's Uighur ethnic group, have recently traveled to the Middle East to join Islamic State. Those Uighurs are part of a broader Muslim migration, spurred by a government crackdown, away from China's western province of Xinjiang, where Muslims have lived for over 1000 years. Although they were designed to dampen Islamic separatism, Chinese policies in the region are creating fertile ground for Islamic extremism.
In 1949, 82 percent of the people living in Xinjiang were Uighurs. In the decades since, a government-sponsored influx of Han Chinese has changed the province's ethnic makeup. By 2010, Xinjiang’s 10 million Uighurs accounted for just 46.3 percent of the population, according to that year’s census.
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