Young men climb a railing at the back for a better view, while a woman in a Muslim head scarf snaps photos on her cell phone.

Every Friday afternoon, students pack a college classroom in Beijing to catch a glimpse of the sharply dressed professor punching the air as he speaks with surprising candor about the travails of his ethnic group, the Uighurs.

"We are not descendants of the dragon but of the wolf," Ilham Tohti shouts, drawing a clear line between the creation myths of the Han Chinese and the Uighur minority. "We were not created by the Chinese Communist Party. Our history stretches back much longer than 60 years."

The weekly lectures are a kind of high-wire act for the 40-year-old economist from Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region in China's far west. He has been put under house arrest dozens of times over the past decade for criticizing how China runs his homeland and treats his people.

The fearlessness so admired by his students, a Chinese ethnic mosaic of Hans, Uighurs, Kazakhs and others, is exactly what the government fears.

Yet Tohti is not a separatist or even a political dissident. He's a Communist Party member and a teacher at a top Chinese university who sees himself as a bridge between Hans and Uighurs. That the government has so far refused to endorse his middle road and work with him shows how difficult it is to resolve differences between the party and its restive Uighurs and Tibetans.

"Tohti stands out for his commitment to working within the established Chinese political order," said Rian Thum, a Uighur history researcher at Harvard University. "He is an outspoken and articulate critic of many discriminatory Chinese policies, but his writings do not challenge the ideological foundations of the People's Republic or the legitimacy of Chinese rule in Xinjiang."

China's Uighurs, about 10 million, make up less than 1 percent of China's population and inhabit a region rich in oil and gas deposits that abuts Central Asia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam revived nationalism among some of the region's mainly Muslim Uighurs for a separate Xinjiang, or what they call East Turkistan.

An influx of Han Chinese settlers embitters Uighurs who say it is costing them jobs and threatens to swamp their culture. The resentment exploded in riots July 5 in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi. Han-owned shops were vandalized and torched, and many Han were beaten and even burned to death.

The government has tried dozens of Uighurs and executed nine of them.