Right now in Xinjiang, Uighurs and the Chinese army are engaging in some very bloody conflict. That's what the media is catching. Everything else is a little fuzzy. It seems like some people want to use the moment to prove that people won't trade freedom for stability. Some people want to connect the Uighurs to Muslim terrorism because the US locked some of them up at Guantanamo Bay. Some people are comparing the Uighurs to the Tibetans.
That is to say, very few Americans know about the Uighur minority of China, so the media is comparing their movement to more familiar movements that we think we do understand: democracy v. communism; terrorism v. freedom; despotism v. the people. Oversimplified binaries that trigger knee jerk responses with which readers can make judgements without knowing much about the situation.
Example: in democracy v. communism, the Uighurs automatically become agents for democracy, because they are fighting a communist government. Because the US brings democracy to the world and its a wonderful thing, the Uighurs must be justified in their protests. Such a simple system of analysis. So problematic.
As a result, I don't have a very clear picture of who is protesting. Is it all Uighurs in the Urumqi area? Is it only part of their population? Why now? What triggered this? What's the history of the movements that led to these moments?
I totally agree- the media oversimplifies these things to the point where Americans are rooting for the "democracy side", or the "freedom side" without knowing all the issues. This black-white approach is not accurate, but it does sell commercial time.
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