… and a decent Op Ed piece in the Oz today. David Brophy writes:

ON a research trip to Urumqi earlier this year, I couldn’t help but notice the presence of tanks and artillery on the city’s outskirts. That firepower now has been deployed to the streets of Urumqi’s southern neighbourhoods, where the city’s minority Uighur population is concentrated.

For Uighurs across the world, the crackdown will only confirm what many have long felt, that their homeland is under a military occupation.

Han Chinese, on the other hand, see their own nation as a victim of the West, which makes them reluctant to conceive of the Chinese state as a bullying neighbour or of Xinjiang as anything but an integral part of China.

The regime’s inability to acknowledge the failure of policy and the long-term build-up of discontent means unrest can be explained by Beijing only in terms of impressionable Uighurs falling foul of a malignant conspiracy.

Read the full piece here.

What’s going on? One imagines that the crisis in Urumqi lies beyond the ken of the Oz’s normal stable of culture war hacks, so they have to open their pages up a little, until the team can work out the new line. After all, the Uighurs are Muslims (that’s bad!) but the Chinese are communists (double plus bad!). It’s all very confusing.

Never mind! Elsewhere on the page, Michael Costa writes about teacher unionists. And what are they doing? Why, they are holding the future to ransom, of course! Ah, that’s more like it! God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.