PSA: Riots. Hmm.

"URUMQI, China – Riots and street battles killed at least 140 people in China's western Xinjiang province and injured 828 others in the deadliest ethnic
unrest to hit the region in decades. Officials said Monday the death toll was expected to rise.

Police sealed off streets in parts of the provincial capital, Urumqi, after discord between ethnic Muslim Uighur people and China's Han majority erupted into violence. Witnesses reported a new, smaller protest Monday in a second city, Kashgar.

The unrest is another troubling sign for Beijing at how rapid economic development has failed to stem — and even has exacerbated — resentment among ethnic minorities, who say they are being marginalized in their homelands as Chinese migrants pour in."

Most people don't think of western China as another location for the sort of "conflict in the Middle East" fighting we hear about in Palestine or Lebanon, but that's probably because most people don't know that China actually has two minority people groups that are ethnically Muslim. Of the two, the Hui and Uighurs (as it's spelled here), the Uighurs are by far the more seriously and substantially Muslim, and much farther west than the Hui, who are mostly in the middle of the country (the equivalent of South Dakota, as opposed to Portland, Oregon).

Kashgar, where one of my former teammates from my first year in China is teaching, actually, is on the Kazakh border. People there don't speak Chinese; they speak Uighur, which is in a completely different language group (Turkic), and which uses Arabic script. In fact, speaking Chinese to a Uighur means aligning yourself with "the others," if not "the enemy".

The Chinese government has been dealing with the unrest in the region in part by encouraging Han Chinese to move west to Xinjiang province, which should cause a natural cultural shift and dilute the differences between Han and Uighur. It's a pretty ingenious nonviolent solution -- but it doesn't take into account how strongly Muslim the Uighurs are, or how being confronted with nonmuslim infidels on a daily basis might make them dig their heels in deeper rather than surrender to the cultural gestalt caused by an influx of Han.

There may just be too much difference to overcome it through everyday, bit-by-bit assimilation.

I mean, according to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, the only domesticated "for food" animal native to China is the pig.

Think about how that goes over with Muslims.