its not about 'people of the book'. its about who has done more harm to muslims. china has so far got her hands clean.
This article was what I found most quickly, but there is a lot on the www about the repression of muslims in China's far western provinces. --
TS
Jihad in China's Far West
By Austin Ramzy / Kashgar Wednesday, Aug. 06, 2008, Time.com
Kashgar is about as far as one can get from the Chinese capital of Beijing and still be in China. In fact, there is little to indicate one is still in China. Most of the people in this desert town are Uighurs, an Islamic minority group that has clashed again and again with rule of China's majority Han ethnicity. The land surround the city is brown and bare save for irrigated orchards and fruit fields. The white caps of the Pamirs loom in the distance. Women walk through the streets in headscarves, sometimes fully covered from the hot sun and blowing sand. Men wearing skull caps greet one another with handshakes and the phrase "As-Salamu 'Alaykum," Arabic for "Peace be upon you." The language of the Uighurs is closer to Turkish than Chinese, and the architecture — Islamic domes, decorative Arabic script, grape trellises — looks more to the oasis cities of Central Asia than to the east.
But the signs of Beijing's power are all around. Kashgar and the huge province of Xinjiang to which it belongs to are, by decree of the Chinese Communist Party, on Beijing time, even though geographically the city should be two hours behind the national capital. Han Chinese make up about a quarter of Kashgar's population, and markers announcing the route of the Olympic flame, which passed through here in June, line the streets. Banners hang that read, "All ethnicities hand in hand welcome the Olympics." This week, however, some locals may have decided they wanted none of Beijing's Games.
Chinese authorities say two Kashgar men, taxi driver Kurbanjan Hemit, 28, and vegetable vendor Abdurahman Azat, 33, carried out an attack on security forces in the city. The local government says the pair, who are Uighur, were driven by religious extremism to attack a group of Chinese border police, killing 16 and injuring 16 more. "They said that religious beliefs are more important than life, more important than the prosperity of their familes, even their mothers," said Shi Dagang, the Communist Party secretary for Kashgar prefecture. "They were trying their best to perform jihad." The scene of the incident: the entrance of the Yijin Hotel, a dingy yellow three-story building with reflective windows. A visit to the site a day after saw a few police milling around but nothing to give the impression that the spot was more significant than others in this highly-guarded city.
Chinese authorities claim the attack is part of a long-running effort by Uighur separatists to tarnish the Beijing Olympics. Without giving details, Shi said that a preliminary investigation found similarities between this week's attack and evidence uncovered from a raid on a Uighur separatist training camp in January 2007. "Starting from last year the East Turkestan forces at home and abroad tried sabotage and violent activities targeting the Beijing Games," Shi said, using the historic name of an independent Uighur state which some groups have hopes of restoring through violent struggle. "The East Turkestan Islamic Movement and the East Turkestan Liberation Organization are the two most active ones." Shi cited online postings that describe how to make bombs and poisons, the attempted attack on a flight from the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi in March, and unrest in Hetian (or Khotan in the Uighur language) in March. He quoted the leader of the East Turkestan Liberation Organization as saying, "The Beijing Games are our one last golden opportunity to inflict such attacks on China. Even though we know we are weak like an egg on a stone, they will try to smear the stone."
Despite the relative calm, signs of dissent were apparent. "There's a lot of things we keep in here," one Uighur shopkeeper said, tapping on my chest. He said that decades of Chinese rule had changed the mentality of his people. "We've been under a lot of pressure" he says. "For some minorities the conditions have been good, but not for us."
An old man sitting near a sign that said "Unauthorized pilgrimages are illegal religious activity," complained that the city's Han residents were given all the economic opportunities. "Do you think people are happy here? Do you see them smiling, dancing, singing? No, because they have no work," he said. He argued that the influx of Han settlers, and the authoritarian control of the Communist Party were the sources of Uighur anger. "Why are people unhappy? Because power is in control of the Communist Party."
Jihad in China's Far West - TIME