Unrest in China

Unrest on the western front

Our correspondent reports from Urumqi, scene of the largest protests in China in two decades

THE city of Urumqi was calm but tense a day after violent unrest on Sunday July 5th which had, according to official reports, left at least 140 people dead and 800 injured. In the centre of town traffic was eerily light and many businesses were hidden behind shutters. A tight cordon of riot police, who wore helmets and wielded shields and clubs, surrounded People’s Square. Elsewhere armed security men blocked roads and stopped pedestrians and cars attempting to enter predominantly Uighur neighbourhoods. Army and police vehicles, including armoured personnel-carriers, patrolled the streets. Sirens continued to wail late into Monday night.

Ethnic tension between Han Chinese and the native Uighurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic minority group, has long bristled in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the west of China. The Uighurs make up nearly half of Xinjiang’s 20m population. Large-scale violence flares occasionally in other cities in Xinjiang, but Urumqi, the region’s capital, had previously been calm. The violence on Sunday apparently began with a demonstration by Uighurs against the government’s handling of an incident in southern Guangdong province in late June, in which two Uighur migrants were attacked and reportedly killed amid accusations that they had abused a Han Chinese woman.

Chinese officials quickly accused an overseas group, the World Uighur Congress, of having “masterminded”, “instigated” and “controlled” the Urumqi unrest, but they offered no proof. The congress and other expatriate Uighur groups denied the charges. Uighur residents of Urumqi were reluctant to speak to foreign journalists amid Monday’s heavy security crackdown and, for the most part, local access to the internet has been prevented.

It is unclear precisely how many members of the security forces have been deployed in Urumqi, but Xinjiang’s governor, Nur Bekri, says that officials will use “all means” to maintain control. According to the state media hundreds of arrests have been made in response to the violence.

The south-eastern part of the city appeared to suffer most violence on Sunday: police were out in force on Monday; broken shop windows dotted the area, along with fire-damaged buildings and scores of burnt and overturned cars. The scorched shells of eleven new cars sat on the lot in front of the Xinjiang Tongtong Geely Automobile dealership. According to the general manager, Guo Jianxin, several hundred rioters had attacked his business late on Sunday, damaging or destroying more than 50 cars, worth 3.3m yuan ($483,000). One of his workers was injured, he said, and three others had locked themselves in the basement, emerging through the shattered glass late on Monday morning.

The nearby Urumqi Friendship Hospital had received four dead and 98 injured, of whom 18 were in serious condition. One of the injured, said the hospital director, had severe brain trauma and was not expected to survive another night.

Among the patients lining the corridor of the hospital’s overcrowded ward was Huang Zhenjiang, a 48-year-old taxi driver. Bloodied and bandaged, Mr Huang said that he had finished his long day of driving and was handing the car to the night-shift driver when he was attacked and beaten by rioters using stones and clubs. He suffered a broken nose, fractured ribs, concussion and a badly damaged right eye. He described the violence as “terrifying” and “unimaginable” and said he had no idea who his attackers were or what had prompted them. As a Han Chinese man, however, he was, most likely, a victim of Uighur rage.