Beijing's Islamic Complex

In early July 2009, the official Chinese press reported that 197 people had been bludgeoned or stabbed to death and nearly 2,000 more injured in communal violence in Ürümqi, the principal city of Xinjiang, the People’s Republic of China’s farthest northwest region. For observers worldwide, the clash prompted a quick primer on another of the world’s festering ethnic conflicts. In this case, the antagonists were Han Chinese—Ürümqi’s dominant ethnic group thanks to decades of government-encouraged Chinese settlement—and Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority, some 7–9 million strong, who have long bristled under the PRC’s erratic and harsh rule.