First, comparisons to last year’s riots (“protests”) in Tibet focused on the media’s bias in naming the incidents, which led to speculation that discrepencies in reporting may be because Tibetans are peaceful Buddhists and Uyghurs are Muslims.

Now, Glenn Greenwald is lamenting that if only Uyghurs were Christian, the Chinese government would be much more easily undermined.

What the hell? Any ethnic tension that explodes into violence undermines the Chinese government, not least of all because social stability is the main tenet of Chinese governance from which the Party derives its legitimacy. Forget comparisons to last year’s Tibet riots. Perhaps differences in coverage do point to a subtle bias in Western media and/or society. But achieving sympathetic parity for any oppositional group in China is the least anybody in the East or West should be worried about.

The main concern is the rise in number of mass incidents in China that reflects the growing tensions between ethnic groups. It is no longer simply government versus minorities. Evelyn Chan has a great explanation on this shift to what she calls horizontal violence. Even more worrisome is how government policies have fueled and even perpetuated the hatred.

This new dimension to China’s ethnic conflict is an unintended consequence of Beijing’s policies to contain the threat of ethnic ‘splittism’ in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. A reason for the rise in violence against Han-Chinese civilians is simply the rise in Han migration to these minority provinces. The “Open up the West” campaign of early 2000 sought to develop the western provinces by injecting capital in infrastructure and public works in the region. Officials believed that economic development would quell unrest and settle minority discontent.

However the result was a tremendous inflow of Han migrant workers. Mongolians in Inner Mongolia for instance now represent a minority in the province, making up less than 20 percent of the population. In Urumqi, the Han Chinese makes up a large percentage of the population. The rise in Han migrant workers has thus caused new lines of ethnic fissures, concerning discrimination over hiring, ethnic division of labor and socio-economic marginalization on ethnic lines.

Needless to say, the government’s usual clamp-down policy may no longer work so well anymore. But looks like it’s going with the usual.