'9/11 was good for China'

What about Xinjiang and the Uighurs and other areas where there is unrest? Can that destabilise China?

This is where China is very brutal. Forget about history, forget about culture, forget about all the reasons they give for having those areas.

If you are China, on the east, you have one coast. And in the middle of that coast is a big island called Taiwan. Whoever controls the islands of Taiwan militarily can control the whole coast. It is currently called the world's biggest aircraft carrier. And that's why we (America) moved in there in the 1950s when the Korean war started. So they can't have anybody who's an enemy on that island.

In the west, Xinjiang, Tibet, these are not ethnic Chinese people. Historically China has wanted to control these areas as a buffer. Between India, the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, Then there is Mongolia, Inner Mongolia now, between Russia and China. And once they've got it, they are not going to let it go. And the way they do that, they overwhelm it with people.

Inner Mongolia is now only 15 per cent ethnic Mongolian. And they've been handing out incentives for hundreds and thousands -- if not millions of Chinese -- to move to Tibet for 20 years. So Tibet, if it is not already, will soon be majority Han Chinese. And In the Muslim western province of Xinjiang, they cracked down very very hard on anything…

It's the only Muslim part of the world where they didn't have street protests about these Danish cartoons…

They won't let that go. You can talk about the fairness or unfairness of that, but it's a historical fact. On the good side, what they try to do is develop these places. They invest money and build up their economy, so that people are comfortable and not protesting.

The other side is that they overwhelm them with more Chinese. 9/11 was good for China. Xinjiang all of a sudden became a terrorist issue. So America never complained about any crackdowns in Xinjiang. These are now ethnic Muslim terrorists.

Which is why the Chinese have been quite supportive of the Indian stand on Kashmir, much to Pakistan's ire.

I haven't followed that issue. Well, it's complicated, and I just think that if the governments spend all their time trying to make all their citizens prosperous and comfortable, then life would be too good to go out and start shooting each other.

Image: Muslim Uighur men pray at a funeral outside a mosque April, 21 2002 in Urumqi, Xinjiang region, China.

China has demanded the repatriation of Uighur fighters captured alongside the Taliban in Aghanstan. It is concerned about Uighur separatist fighting for a homeland in northwestern China and has begun a crackdown in the region. Amnesty International has accused China of repression and execution of the Uighur people in Xinjiang.

Photograph: Kevin Lee/Getty Images