Source: The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121813553021721423.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
When Dang Dongming completed a military tour in this remote corner of western China, he did an increasingly common thing. He stayed.
The 26-year-old son of a farmer from China's Gansu province refers affectionately to Kashgar as "an oasis in the desert," a good spot to practice his hobby of photography and to build a car tour business. He even learned to speak the Turkic language of local Muslim Uighurs.
But Mr. Dang doesn't feel welcome. As a member of China's dominant Han ethnic group, Mr. Dang says, "I'm a minority here."
Historically an important way station between east and west on the Silk Road, Kashgar today is a flash point of ethnic tension in China. Sometimes the unrest is punctuated by violence, as in a deadly attack on 16 policemen this week.
More often, though, the anxieties are reflected in a daily disconnect over food, fashion, religion and language. There are the newcomers like Mr. Dang, hoping to make their fortune on the nation's frontier, and the area's 13 other ethnic groups, who feel they are being shoved aside in the gold rush. China's government has encouraged the westward push -- by bolstering infrastructure links to the richer east, for instance -- partly to bring the outlying regions in line with the nation's extraordinary economic boom. Tibet festers with similar tensions, apparent this March when Tibetans rampaged against Han business owners in Lhasa.
Local groups like the Uighurs complain of the Communist Party's heavy hand in their religious affairs and challenges to other aspects of traditional life, while officials in Beijing express frustration about what they perceive as ingratitude for the money they have invested in the region.