A year after Xinjiang riots, tensions simmer
Originally published by Asia Times, 16 July 2010
By Gordon Ross
BEIJING – More than a year after the riots in China’s remote Xinjiang autonomous region, the country’s bloodiest ethnic clash in decades, calm has returned to the capital Urumqi. But the underlying tensions remain – tensions that Beijing will be forced to address as it moves forward in its campaign to develop the country’s west.
On July 5, 2009, a group of Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslim people and the biggest ethnic group in Xinjiang, gathered in People’s Square in Urumqi, to protest government inaction after a deadly attack on Uyghur factory workers in Guangdong province, some 4,800 kilometers away to the east.
What started peacefully soon turned violent. In the riots that followed – pitting Uyghurs against the country’s majority Han
Chinese – 200 people died and 1,600 more were injured, primarily Han, according to government estimates.
Today, many questions remain unanswered and finger-pointing continues. Human rights groups say Beijing has underestimated the number of Uyghurs killed by Han vigilantes in the days after July 5, and they argue that state media have glossed over the police’s violent crackdown. The central government says external forces fueled the flames of violence.
China’s two English-language newspapers – China Daily and Global Times – carried front-page stories of the anniversary, but offered few details or Uyghur sources. Both papers featured stories of Han orphans whose parents were killed by Uyghur rioters.
People’s Daily, the organ of the Communist Party, carried the China Daily report and state-run Xinhua news agency’s English-language service did not address the riots. Other features leading up to the anniversary focused on tightened security measures in Urumqi.
But despite the seeming calm, the ethnic tensions that played a role in the 2009 riots continue to be a factor as Beijing pushes through with development plans for the country’s west.
Developing China’s vast western regions through migration and investment has been a major priority for the country’s communist rulers. Last week, the central government announced it would spend US$100 billion on development in the region.
Xinjiang, rich in oil and gas and minerals, has been a particularly important focus of the government’s development plans.
Nineteen provincial and municipal governments send aid to Xinjiang – in total the region has received aid and supplies totaling more than 4 billion yuan (US$590.6 million) in recent years, creating thousands of new jobs, said Ma Dazheng, deputy director of the Border History and Geography Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Ma told Inter Press Service that Beijing was seeking two goals in Xinjiang – development and stability – and that one could not occur without the other. He said that often, central government policies in Xinjiang were not enforced at the local level, and that it would take some time before the results are seen.
“I can’t say whether there will be more violence; I can say the overall situation is stable in Xinjiang,” Ma said. “It’s well known the underlying tensions haven’t been solved, so it is unavoidable for these unexpected incidents to break out, but I think in the foreseeable future, the chances are slim for a mass incident like the [July 5] riots last year.”
Last week, the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) released a report titled “Can Anyone Hear Us? Voices From the 2009 Unrest in Urumqi”, which examined last year’s unrest through first-hand accounts. The report also examined the economic, social and political factors surrounding the unrest and the information blackout that followed.
Urumqi residents “described witnessing security forces’ use of deadly live fire against Uyghur demonstrators on July 5 last year, extensive beatings of Uyghurs by civilians in July and September and arbitrary detentions that have exacerbated the growing divide between the Uyghur and Han communities,” UHRP said in a statement.
In the aftermath of the violence, the Chinese government instituted the “world’s longest-running Internet blackout”, and blocked international phone calls and text messages, it said. The result, said the report’s authors, is that little is known about what happened that day and in the months that followed.
Critics of Chinese government policy say Beijing has fermented discontent by encouraging Han migration in the West, resulting in unemployment for local ethnic groups. “The population transfer that is altering Xinjiang’s composition is one dimension of a systematic Chinese policy that threatens the survival of the Uyghur people,” wrote Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy in the Washington Post.
“The Uyghur language has been virtually eliminated from school instruction, while hundreds of books on Uyghur history and culture have been banned. The Uyghurs’ Muslim faith is under attack as religious personnel are forced to undergo ‘patriotic re-education’ and the construction of mosques is strictly controlled.”
As if adding insult to injury, Gershman said, Chinese authorities are currently demolishing the Old City of Kashgar in Xinjiang’s far west, forcibly removing 200,000 people in 65,000 households.
The Chinese government has placed the blame squarely on outside forces, notably the exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer, who has lived in Washington DC since 2005 after her release from a Chinese prison. Kadeer has denied any wrongdoing.
Chen Xiushan, director of the Institute of Regional and Urban Economics at Renmin University of China, said economic inequalities exacerbated tensions in Xinjiang last year, adding that cultural considerations should be factored into economic policies.
“Many ethnic cultures in the west are very fragile. We should adopt policy and economic measures that help to preserve the ethnic cultures,” Chen said.
(Inter Press Service)