What Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Hui Muslims have in common with the Uighur here is that they are fellow minorities from Xinjiang who were also subjected to Han domination only recently. Moreover, the Kazakh population is often seen as a fifth column due to a titular republic for their own people being located right next door.

Citing Shohrat Zakir is disingenuous. In the Soviet Union it was common for people to point to members of the ethnic minorities placed in official roles and say "See, there is no discrimination or oppression”, and the exact same phenomenon holds for contemporary China though it is much less talked about. But those ethnic-minority bureaucrats or politicians invariably made compromises: they did not particularly insist on using their own language in officialdom or defending the rights of their ethnic kin to do the same, and when they did publicly use their native language it was merely in the service of propaganda initiatives directed by the central government. But those Communist Party members who have insisted on the dignity of China’s minority languages and called for resisting Han assimilation have, as I said, suffered persecution for it.

The Uighur definitely have been independent-minded. Regardless of military collaboration with the Qing, the average Uighur would not have had so much exposure to Han culture and language until recent decades.