Cracks exposed in China's minorities policy
On 5 July 2009 large-scale riots erupted in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, resulting in 192 deaths, 1,680 injured and widespread destruction of property. The rioters appear to have been mainly young and ill-educated Uighur men and their targets Han Chinese immigrants.
The security authorities in Urumqi were initially slow to respond to the violence, and began an effective security crackdown only when groups of Han Chinese vigilantes, outraged at the perceived failure of the security authorities to protect Han Chinese lives and property, began to patrol the streets seeking revenge. The Xinjiang authorities detained large numbers of Uighur suspects, and Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan promised that those involved in the rioting would suffer severe penalties. The riots were deemed sufficiently serious for President Hu Jintao to cut short his attendance at the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, to take charge of the security operation.
The strength of the government crackdown makes it unlikely that further episodes of violence will occur in the immediate future. But the events, coming after large-scale rioting in Tibet the previous year, raised questions about the effectiveness of China’s policies for managing strategically important border regions, which are also home to substantial ethnic-minority populations, and about internal stability in China more generally.
The immediate cause of the rioting seems to have been an incident which took place on 25 June hundreds of miles away in Shaoguan, an industrial town in Guangdong province. Han Chinese workers in a toy factory raided dormitories occupied by Uighur co-workers in response to rumours, since proven to be false, that Uighurs had raped two Han Chinese women. According to Chinese news reports, two Uighurs were killed and over 100 injured, but other reports cited a higher death toll. The Uighurs had recently arrived in Shaoguan as a result of an official policy to move workers from areas of high unemployment such as Xinjiang to areas where work is plentiful. Tensions between them and the Han Chinese population had been growing for some time.
The reaction in Urumqi was initially peaceful, with groups of students protesting the apparent failure of the authorities to take action against those responsible for the assault in Shaoguan. But it quickly descended into violence. Some reports suggested that the violence may have been pre-planned with notices appearing in the windows of taxis several days in advance urging Uighurs to take action. The Chinese authorities, who appear to have missed these early warning signs, were quick to ascribe the violence to external sources, putting the blame squarely on Rebiya Kadeer’s World Uighur Congress (WUC). Kadeer, a self-made Uighur businesswoman who had previously been appointed to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, was jailed in 2000 for her involvement in separatist activities. Following her release in 2005 she moved to Washington and founded the WUC, described as a civil-rights movement for the Uighur people campaigning for autonomy for Xinjiang. Kadeer denied that her organisation was responsible for the violence, which she said was a consequence of Beijing’s failure to accord the Uighurs adequate political and cultural freedom.
An old new frontier
Xinjiang (literally: new frontier), the westernmost area of China comprising a sixth of its total land mass but containing less than 2% of its population, has always been strategically important. For most of recorded history the main strategic threat to the Chinese state came from nomadic tribes, mostly of Turkic ethnicity, pushing eastwards from Central Asia into China’s settled areas. The need to mitigate this threat resulted in periodic efforts by China to occupy Xinjiang, beginning during the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD). Xinjiang was formally incorporated into the Chinese state in 1884, briefly seceded in 1933 and 1944, and between 1934 and 1941 was in effect a Soviet satellite state. It was re-incorporated into the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
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