It’s been brewing for nearly two weeks. The violence in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang province, seems to have been provoked by an incident in Guangdong in southern China on 26 June.
A group of Uighurs, Muslims from Xinjiang, were working in a factory alongside Han Chinese. There’s a lot of prejudice against the Uighurs, who are often accused of being thieves.
This time a Han Chinese factory worker, who has since been arrested, allegedly started a rumour that two Uighurs had raped two Han Chinese women in the factory dormitory. The result was what sounds like a lynching.
Yesterday, students at Xinjiang University demonstrated through the streets of Urumqi, demandng an enquiry, but somewhere along the way the demonstration seems to have turned into a riot with Uighurs attacking shops and properties belonging to Han Chinese.
The pictures shown on Chinese state television look very similar to those from Lhasa last year, when Tibetans rose against Han Chinese who increasingly control commerce in the Tibetan capital.
I’ve been to Urumqi a couple of times – it’s one of those soulless Chinese cities full of high-rises and traffic.
The old Uighur quarter has been squeezed and demolished, and the majority of residents are now Han Chinese who’ve migrated from elsewhere in China.
The government’s aim is simple – make the Uighurs a minority in their own city. The government recently announced that it was going to demolish the ancient centre of Kashgar, in the far west, the last stop on the Silk Road.
They said it was to protect the residents from earthquakes – but historians and Uighur activists say it’s all part of trying to destroy Uighur culture and architecture, to make China one homogenous whole with ethnic minorities like the Tibetans and Uighurs brought out on public occaisons to sing and dance in the traditional way but never to live their culture and history on their own way.
The internet is closed down in Urumqi now. It’s hard to get through on the phone. The city is apparently under the equivalent of martial law. Only the Chinese government’s version of events is allowed.
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Alas, Lindsey is all too right. I visited Urumqi for an educational conference a couple of years ago, and was dispirited by the way that the Uighurs had been marginalized in their own land. I and several other foreign visitors were also shocked by the anti Uiqhur jokes which some of our Han colleagues exchanged. The Urumqi museum (which, ironically, contains ancient relics showing that even the Uighurs had Caucasoid predecessors in the region) contains exhibits of 9 ethnic minorities from the region, these peoples being assigned a stage army role which conveniently and safely removes their culture from lived experience to side show. Pity the Uighurs (or, indeed, any one of China’s scores of ethnic minorities). Beijing cannot tolerate difference or what is perceived as being divided loyalties.
I have visited Urumqi twice in the last three years. Urumqi and Xinjiang province has been the most historically interesting of all the provinces I have travelled in China.
I disagree with western news coverage that Xinjiang province is the ethnic home of only Uighurs. This is not true and the province as well as Urumqi is home to many ethnic groups that provide the rich history and diversity of the province. I experienced meeting friendly people from all the ethnic groups and did not feel that Han Chinese were arrogant or treated other groups with distaste. People simply got on with living their lives. I did not witness discrimination or oppression towards Uighurs and neither to any of the other ethnic groups. It is a shame that Urumqi is now headline news that gives the impression that it is a communist controlled freedom oppressed region of China, which is not what I experienced. There seems to be a common tone to all news reports regarding the Han Chinese that seems to encourage negative portrayal.
I have only very good memories of Urumqi and Xinjiang and wish to return to this area of China in the future.
LH opense her post with “It’s been brewing for nearly two weeks.”.
tosh.
even before the 2008 Olympic Games you, and other news media, reported about the strained relations in the region.
this selective ‘picking the topic of the day to get a headline’ stuff that purports to be journalism is, IMO, a significant problem.
2129 on July 6, David Jones.
“There seems to be a common tone to all news reports regarding the Han Chinese that seems to encourage negative portrayal.”
the Han are used as settlers in Xinjiang as well as Tibet to “make up” the Chinese numbers in the respective indigenous populations.
while the fault, unarguably, lies with the government, you cannot blame the Uighur and Tibetan people for their reaction to the forced influx of Han-Chinese.
Nonsense, those Uiqhurs are treated very well in Xinjiang, they are first citizen in Xinjiang, Han Chinese are the second one. Han Chinse treat Uiqhurs as their brotherhoods, but some evil Uiqhurs always make troubles.
“..some evil Uiqhurs..”
Jane, your use of this emotive language tells it all.
no doubt, some “evil” people exist in every group.
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