So yes, the summer so far has been pretty tumultuous politically. There was (and hopefully still is) Iran, the putsch in Honduras, and now the violence in Xinjiang, in China. The worst thing people can do is make too many comparisons between these cases. Since no one really knows enough about Honduras to have a pre-formulated opinion on it, most of the comparisons currently being made are between the violence in China and the protests in Iran.
Most of the comparisons have the predictable tendency to simplify actors and misunderstand issues, resulting in a satisfying but ultimately derelict conclusion. Yes, both the Chinese and the Iranian regimes are bad, and yes, both are experiencing problems trying to stamp out civil unrest. The similarities pretty much end there though.
The protests in Iran were in response to a blatantly rigged election. The protests were widely based (despite demonstrably false assertions that only "rich, westernised Iranians" supported them), were by far the most part peaceful, and had a clear political aim, ideally with a goal of engagement to achieve that aim. They wanted an independent recount of the vote, they wanted public debate and scrutiny on the issue, and they wanted the right to read what the rest of the world had to say.
In China, on the other hand, the violence broke out due to the classic mix of ethnic tension combined with social and economic unease. A Turkic Muslim minority felt as if it was being mistreated by the government. Protests started, and when the security forces tried to break up the crowds, riots broke out, and Uighurs started massacring innocent Han Chinese bystanders.
Of course, this is the official version of the events, and I have no doubt that the Chinese security forces shot, arrested, and will ultimately execute innocent Uighurs. But it's quite clear that the majority of the dead were Han Chinese, and in large part they were beaten to death, not shot. These are racially motivated riots resulting in the senseless deaths of civilians, with no clear political goal and no clear intention of civil engagement.
Not that the Uighurs, or any other group in China have much room to engage politically with the state. It's quite easy to understand why the violence came about, and the Chinese government is clearly at fault for being brutally authoritarian, and for stupidly not realising how easily backwards religious people become violent. The Chinese government needs to take the initiative to engage with the Uighurs, but it was right to put down the riots.
In Iran, the pro-democracy protests deserve full international support. In China, it needs to be recognised that mobs of Uighurs, no matter how marginalised and culturally alienated they feel, are still in the wrong when they go around beating civilians to death for having the wrong facial structure and skin colour.
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You forgot to draw attention to what is probably the greatest bone of contention between the CCP and the Uyghur population: extensive Han Chinese migration into historically Turkic areas. Of course, as with any other ethnically mixed region, "historically" is a loose adverb. It is now apparent from extensive genetic and archaelogical data that the are now known as Xinjiang (broadly, the Tarim basin) was inhabited by, inter alia, Indo-Iranian Scythians, proto-Mongolic Xiongu - who may have been proto-Turkic, depending on how you interpret the Altaic group - Kazakhs and, of course, isolated Han Chinese communities.
In this context, you can read the current Chinese government's fixation with territorial integrity and the maintenance of this crucial buffer with the rest of Central Asia as a classic instance of nationalistic demarcation-psychology. Much as the French and the Italians considered a sort of headway into traditionally Germanic regions as essential for national security in the late 19th century (the lower Rhineland -Elsass/Alsace - and the Trentino/Alto Adige respectively), the Chinese see the peoples of upper Asia as historic enemies, barbarians if you will, who, if subjugated, would act as an insulating frontier against those the CCP, in its paranoia, perceives as its enemies.
Which leads one squarely into the realm of Taiwan: quite besides the ethnic argument, which, one could add, is far more plausible than arguments advanced for Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, part of Peking's reasoning over claiming the island is the fact that, if you draw a diagonal line following vital Pacific sea-lanes from Sakhalin all the way down to Kaoshiung on Taiwan, you will see precisely against whom the island is meant to be a buffer.
Finally, you may want to draw parallels between the CCP's aggressive para-military settlement policies in Xinjiang and traditional Roman and Han-dynasty forms of colonisation through the use of permanently stationed and settled military personnel. Similar policies two thousand years ago ensured that proto-Thai people were displaced from present-day Southern China. Incidentally, in the glorious stream of historical causality, this would eventually lead to the foundation of Hong Kong and, by extension, your own earthly existence.
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