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.”