The PRC's restless Xinjiang province is turning out to be a big energy provider in the New China,

The PRC's restless Xinjiang province is turning out to be a big energy
provider in the New China,

Chinese Vice-Premier Zeng Peiyan says Xinjiang will become China's
main source of energy in the next five to ten years. Speaking at a
forum on energy resources, Sunday, he said that oil and gas
exploration should be given a priority in the Xinjiang Uygur
Autonomous Region in the northwest of the country. He explained that a
group of large-scale oil and gas fields has been discovered in
Xinjiang which can be exploited to meet China's pressing energy needs.

but the exploitation of Xinjiang's natural resources, argues Martin
Andrew for The Jamestown Foundation, is almost certain to lead to a
backlash in relations between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese,

This will only exacerbate the Uighur’s bitterness and distrust towards
Beijing, giving them another cause for Uighur independence and
insurgency against the Chinese.

The steady flow of energy from the impoverished western periphery to
build rich eastern polis is an ancient game; the Qin empire was a
vector of conquest descending from the smooth expanses of the plateau
into the striations of sedentary space,

The state apparatus that was to take the unification of China to the
sea arose at its opposite edge. Actually, at the edge of that edge.
Not only was the conquering state of Qin a western border state, but
the administrative model it imposed on the empire was elaborated at
its outermost borders, in the military garrison colonies or
commanderies set up to protect sedentary society from 'barbarian'
attack from the steppes.

In the near-future a Uighur “People’s War” on the grid would be a
nightmare scenario for China, says Martin Andrew:

The new infrastructure, including oil refineries, the pipeline,
railways, power stations, and the power grids are vulnerable to attack
by insurgents who could cause vast damage to China’s economy with
little effort.

As a consequence, a new geography of China's security is emerging,

. . the Xinjiang military region recently saw a series of exercises in
the Taklimakan Desert where it incorporated a C4I LAN into a division
in an area 1,000 km long that integrated intelligence, command and
control, automated artillery fire support, airspace surveillance and
control and logistics re-supply. Units in Xinjiang have been commended
by the PLA hierarchy as leading the way in the field of C4I.

This has significant consequences for high-altitude infowar. Insurgent
swarming, for example, ("swarming", the "seemingly amorphous, but
deliberately structured, coordinated . . way to perform military
strikes from all directions"), on a tactical level is digitally
checked:

. .  if a series of insurgent incidents were to occur simultaneously
in different parts of Xinjiang, security forces already have the
infrastructure and means to rapidly respond to them . .

to counter an increased insurgency directed against their
infrastructure grid, Chinese security forces have invested heavily in
updating their Command and Control systems to ensure a rapid response
to any outbreaks of violence.

Furthermore, due to its isolation and varied terrain Xinjiang has
become the PLA's preferred theatre for war-gaming their own version of
the Revolution in Military Affairs,

The Xinjiang Military Region, and not the Nanjing Military District,
has now become the premier information warfare test center for the
PLA. Secondly, it is the training area for large-scale operational
level developments . . [Xinjiang] has become the premier training area
for developing the new “informatized” warfare that the Chinese
military is striving for. China can develop its idea of information
warfare in a relatively free airspace and ground environment enabling
the use of offensive electronic warfare and large scale maneuvers away
from prying eyes and without interfering with commercial activities.

Mounting exercises in Xinjiang enables the PLA to develop
counter-insurgency doctrine in the terrain they would be expected to
operate. On a strategic level, the first joint 'counter-terrorist'
exercise between the PLA and Pakistani forces, was run in Xinjiang:

The exercise was primarily a command and control exercise to assist in
developing and testing procedures for the “international cooperation
in fighting terrorism.”