Two women pass a billboard in Kashgar instructing Uighurs not to wear religious garments that cover their face. Credit:Sanghee Liu But although airports, railway stations, hotels and public squares are routinely manned with heavily armed police and paramilitary, it's the sight of seven-year-old kids leaving school under armed guard that drives home the government's perceived threat of random violence at any public gathering. Security guards and police officers have been stationed at schools in Xinjiang for at least a year but the paramilitary presence is a new development. Paramilitary troops, in fact, have set up a base at the Urumqi No.117 Middle School, where they live and train alongside children in years one to nine. Staff at the school say they don't know how widespread the practice is, but understand it to be part of a strategy for security forces to be spread out across the city and be able to respond to outbreaks of violence - swiftly and in large numbers.

An elderly Uighur man in front of Kashgar's Id Kah mosque. Credit:Sanghee Liu Staff say they see the troops train on the school's football pitch and athletics track outside of school hours, but have been instructed not to go near their quarters. "Photos are absolutely not allowed here, because we have troops living here. It is now, you can say, a school within a military camp," said principal Qin Fang. "You are a journalist … so you know all about the 'stability maintenance' situation, I don't need to say more." China's heightened concern around its homegrown terror problem stems from long-standing tensions within Xinjiang's Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority aggrieved at Communist Party policies it feels Yet China is also confronted with a terror threat from another front. The Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) has captured international attention not only for its swift rise but its brutal means in doing so.

Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, recently singled out China among a small group of nations where he said Muslim rights had been "forcibly seized" - a clear reference to Xinjiang, which is also marked on an IS map that sets out the territorial ambitions of the self-proclaimed caliphate. The University of Virginia's Philip Potter says there is no available evidence that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement - a separatist terrorist group China says has ambitions for Xinjiang independence - has any organisational connections to Islamic State. "IS has become a huge magnet for foreign fighters from all over the world," he says. Potter, as the principal investigator for the US Department of Defence's Minerva Initiative project, is mapping the collaborative networks between terrorist organisations. "Given that there were Uighur militants operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, it would be surprising if some of them did not make their way to Syria and Iraq."

This, combined with evidence that Chinese nationals had been captured while fighting for IS, leads Potter to believe there are about 200 Chinese nationals fighting with IS, as is consistent with some Chinese estimates. "The more difficult question is what these fighters will do when they're finished in Iraq and Syria. Will they move on to another foreign jihad? Will they return to their homelands to conduct or direct attacks there? This latter possibility is what's really troubling Chinese counter-terrorism authorities." Despite that its vast interests in Iraq's energy sector give it even more incentive to want to maintain stability in the region, China looks content to remain on the sidelines despite calls from the United States and Australia for it to join the international coalition against the Islamic State. "The fact that this international coalition is at the invitation and consent of the Iraqi government makes it different from other efforts that China has not supported," Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. "China also fears that a number of its citizens have left China to take up arms with ISIL or its ilk. And so it's an issue that concerns China as well."

Dingding Chen, a professor of politics at the University of Macau, says lying low is no longer the option for China. "For me this may just be one example of China's change in long-term strategy," he said. "This really [could be] the turning point where China should become more active and more assertive [while] also not becoming a dominant bully in the region."