Tanshan village is about as far away from Baghdad and Washington as it is possible to get, but a looming war in Iraq is never far from the residents’ minds. Living deep in the parched and impoverished hills of northern China’s Ningxia region, the villagers usually worry about more immediate problems, such as whether their meagre harvest of wheat and beans will last out the year. But here and in other areas of southern Ningxia – where more than 80 per cent of people belong to the Muslim Hui ethnic group – many are watching the US build-up to war with anger. While acknowledging that a terrible tragedy hit the United States on September 11, 2001, they cast US behaviour since then in terms of the strong bullying the weak. Some see the looming war as stemming from a personal grudge by US President George W. Bush against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whom Mr Bush’s father chose not to topple during the 1991 Gulf War. Full Story