On March 13, 2014, Asia News, a Roman Catholic periodical, published an interview with Brian Grim, who for many years directed the religion program of the Pew Research Center and is now president of the Business and Religious Freedom Foundation. Grim is one of the most trustworthy religious demographers in the world—ask him how many Buddhists there are in Venezuela and he’ll right away give you the best available numbers. Quite apart from counting religious noses, one of Grim’s professional as well as personal major concerns has been the condition of religious freedom in different parts of the world.
The immediate occasion for the interview was the massacre on March 1 in a crowded railway station in the southern Chinese city of Kunming which killed 29 people and injured over one hundred. Although Kunming is far removed from the northwest province of Xijiang, where there have been previous acts of terror by Uighurs, an ethnic minority of Muslim faith, speaking a Turkic language. The Chinese authorities immediately blamed Uighurs for the massacre, probably with some justification. There has been massive migration of ethnic Chinese into the province, where indigenous Uighurs now constitute less than 50% of the population. Any movements favoring Uighur autonomy have been roughly suppressed.
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