IN CHINA’S far western region of Xinjiang, the authorities are fearful. What they call terrorist attacks carried out by Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group that regards Xinjiang as its homeland, have killed 400 people in the past couple of years. The latest such incident, on June 22nd, left 18 people dead near the southern city of Kashgar. In recent months officials in Xinjiang claim to have broken up more than 180 terrorist groups—at least one of them reportedly set up by Uighurs who had fought with Islamic State in the Middle East. State television recently aired footage of children being turned into “killing machines” for global jihad at a training camp near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. China’s rhetoric is overblown, but the country is right to worry about terrorism. In March last year a group of Uighurs knifed 31 Chinese civilians to death at a railway station in the south-western city of Kunming.
China recognises that part of the problem is a home-grown one: that many of Xinjiang’s 10m Uighurs have felt left out of the country’s economic boom. Thanks, not least, to its oil and gas industries,...
from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1KcDpHK
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