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.
