As a Uighur born, raised, and educated in East Turkistan (Xinjiang) reading the letter China a convenient punching bag made me think that I was reading something put out by the Propaganda Department of the People's Republic of China.

I don't have too much time to dispute and give counter examples for each and every one of the lame points raised by the writer. I would simply refer him to two major facts.

Firstly, East Turkistan was indisputability an independent country until 1800. Since then it has been fighting for its independence and indeed gained it for a few brief moments as recently as the 1940s.

The official annexation of East Turkistan by China happened in 1950 much like what they did to Tibet. As for his argument that East Turkistan has always been part of China, I would ask the writer to examine the perimetres of the Great Wall of China.

Why was the wall built at the cost of millions of lives? Was it not to protect the country from the Huns, Turks and/or Uighurs?

I would also ask the writer to check the dictionary meaning of 'Xinjiang' in Chinese for I am sure he will find another explanation for the Chinese meaning and that is 'new frontier, new border'.

I would then ask him to analyse the meaning of 'new' for has it not been only 50 years that the word 'Xinjiang' has been used to call East Turkistan?

As for the records of China's human rights, democracy and its treatment of minorities, I simply refer him to reports released by two prominent human rights groups in the world, namely, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China .

Their reports outline and prove that there is clear repression of minorities in terms of religion and other factors in China.

While I am pretty sure the writer will be quick to call these two organisations biased towards Chinese government, I would sincerely urge him to study the history and current situation in Xinjiang before rushing to protect the Chinese communist regime.

And if he travels to Xinjiang to see for himself the lives of the Uighur people, I am but positive that he will be too embarrassed to write such a letter as the above again (unless, of course, he works for the Chinese Embassy in Malaysia).