Wall Street Journal, 1 November 2013

LUKQUN, China—Police armed with assault rifles man checkpoints on the roads leading to this dusty town in the Xinjiang region, which has re-emerged as a flashpoint in a long-running ethnic conflict that this week reached Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Authorities blame a deadly car crash and explosion on Monday in the heart of the Chinese capital on terrorism. They quickly zeroed in on Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim area in China’s northwest. On Wednesday, they said a Lukqun resident was one among several people detained in connection with the attack.

Soon after the attack, police set up checkpoints into Lukqun, restricting access and searching vehicles. Police patrol downtown streets alongside fruit vendors and barbecue stalls selling meat skewers.

Lukqun, a town of around 30,000 people, is one of several towns in focus in the rift between ethnic Uighurs—a people related to the Turks who have lived in this region for more than a thousand years—and China’s ethnic Han majority.

Four months ago, armed security personnel swarmed the area after an outburst of violence left at least 27 dead, and local officials moved to install video cameras around mosques. In 2009, nearly 200 people died in interethnic clashes between Uighurs and Han laround the regional capital, Urumqi.

The government has long blamed religious extremism for most of the unrest in Xinjiang. But many Uighurs—as well as ethnic Hui minorities in the area—say deep socioeconomic disparities in Lukqun and elsewhere play a major part.

“It’s about social equality,” said one longtime resident, who like others said resentment against Han Chinese in the area had risen lately. Many blame government policies meant to spur economic growth, which attracted a massive influx of Han Chinese and in the process both exacerbated a wealth gap and made Uighurs feel marginalized in what they consider their homeland.

On Monday, authorities say, a Jeep drove up to the front of the Forbidden City—a pre-eminent symbol of Chinese history and power—and burst into flames, killing two tourists as well as the car’s three occupants. Later, authorities said they had detained five suspects, all with names that appeared to be those of ethnic Uighurs.

Authorities haven’t announced charges against the local man, whom they named as Yusup Umarniyaz. During a visit to his onetime neighborhood, Sangeqiao village, down the road from the center of Lukqun, some residents said they didn’t know him, others that he no longer lived there.

The exact causes of the June uprising in Lukqun remain sketchy. The official Xinhua news agency at the time described Uighurs brandishing long knives and killing civilians as they charged government offices. Overseas-based Uighur groups dispute that account.

Since then, adapting to the heavy police presence has become a way of life for Uighurs in the area, who live in ramshackle brick and stone homes in the shadow of rolling sand dunes. Many of the residents interviewed said they feared reprisals from local authorities, whom they said were more sensitive to criticism following the June attacks.

Mosques are also facing tougher scrutiny. At the Dongda Mosque, in the nearby city of Shanshan, Persian-style rugs cover the floors of the well-weathered compound. One morning this week, three men, whom mosque visitors identified as local police, were installing video-surveillance equipment in its main prayer room.

Locals said that after the June uprising, the government embarked on an effort to install surveillance equipment at major mosques across the area. Calls to the Shanshan and Lukqun governments rang unanswered Thursday.

Roughly a month after the violence, a procurement website for the prefecture of Turpan, which oversees Lukqun, sought bidders for supplying surveillance equipment to install in the area’s mosques.

Posters urging proper behavior among Muslims were posted in the compound’s leafy courtyard. One of the signs appeared to call for ethnic harmony, reading: “The Han can’t be separated from ethnic-minority groups. The ethnic-minority groups can’t be separated from the Han.”

Parts of the area’s economy appear to be growing steadily. State enterprises are extracting valuable mineral resources, including significant oil reserves. Foreign and luxury cars cruise the streets of larger locales like Shanshan.

But the oil engineerswho wereseen wandering local markets in red jumpsuits appeared to be almost exclusively Han.

“There are no jobs for us,” said another local Uighur man, who said state-run and other enterprises require fluency in Mandarin Chinese. Uighurs in Lukqun speak a language loosely related to Turkish, and many struggle with anything more than basic conversations in Mandarin. Upbeat Uighur-language folk pop remains the music of choice for many drivers.

The man said he was torn about Uighur students studying Mandarin in schools. On the one hand, he said, he hoped his children could take advantage of opportunities never available to him. On the other, “The Uighur language will be gone in 40 or 50 years,” he said.

In the days after the June violence, police began pouring in, local residents say. Most worrying is that some of them were now openly carrying firearms, which wasn’t previously the case, the residents said.

Extra security cameras were quickly installed in downtown Shanshan and elsewhere, residents said. Uighurs traveling to the area from other parts of Xinjiang meanwhile received tough scrutiny from police.

In August, local leaders published 21 new regulations governing religion in the area, which a government statement said were needed to “eliminate social dangers and safeguard social stability.”

Among the new rules, the government said it would crack down on “illegal religious activities” online as well as the dissemination of any materials the government deemed “damaging to ethnic unity.”

—Yang Jie and Charles Hutzler contributed to this article.

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