Russia and China are not friends. The two Asian giants tangled for centuries over the vastness of resource-rich desert and mountain between them. They remain uneasy neighbours. Their leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, recently proclaimed a partnership in a ‘new order’. But they are trapped by geography, birth rates and strategy in a very old order; one that explains why the Chinese leadership distrusts the Kremlin, fears its own subjects and keeps an iron grip on the borderlands.

‘Chinese Turkestan’ only exists in vintage travel books. Today it is officially known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. It is in the news because China is accused of committing crimes against humanity in a campaign to instil what it calls ‘stability and order’ among the original inhabitants and Chinese settlers, who now outnumber them.

The Communist regime’s well-documented abuses against the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people, are so gross that they tend to obscure a paranoid insecurity that is as real today as in a bygone age.