Uyghurs is an internal affair and they brought Beijing pressure on themselves by making terrorism acts. Fishing in other nations' waters, bullying Taiwan, leaking virus are international acts that are serious enough for retaliation from the international community, if they wanted to do something about it.
List of incidents covered within this general Wikipedia article [1].
A factor I haven't seen discussed much in non-Chinese press is that the Xinjiang region was one of the last (if not the very last) to resist the CCP in the Chinese Civil War [2] [3], with some relatively non-trivial, remotely-originated clandestine support by both the (by then) Taiwan-based KMT and CIA until well after (around 1953) the generally-recognized end of the civil war (around 1949).
I'd like to hear the perspective of native-born Chinese "CCP-ologist" and "CIA-ologist" HN readers on how this historical background might color the CCP's current handling of the region. IMHO, both the CCP and CIA have long memories, but I could be off base.
Uyghurs is an internal affair and they brought Beijing pressure on themselves by making terrorism acts. Fishing in other nations' waters, bullying Taiwan, leaking virus are international acts that are serious enough for retaliation from the international community, if they wanted to do something about it.