China Western is a journey through the Chinese region of Xinjiang, in the north-west of the country, a strategic enclave where the Muslim Uyghur minority lives. Xinjiang is one of the most sparsely populated regions of the People's Republic, with twenty million inhabitants over an area of more than a million and a half square kilometres. The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking people of sedentary tradition and Sunni Muslim religion, with little or no cultural affinity with the Han Chinese. They are one of the fifty-five ethnic minorities officially recognised by the Chinese state, and the ones that have offered the greatest resistance to assimilation and to the rule of Beijing, as Nicolás de Pedro, an expert on Central Asia, explains in the historical introduction to the book. Xinjiang is a latent conflict with cyclical explosions of violence that have worsened in recent years. Carlos Spottorno (Budapest, 1971) focuses his work on the documentary field, with a particular vision that highlights the socioeconomic and cultural background of the regions he photographs.