140 slain in riots in China

[AllanF]

It is a real power keg...as if it was on before!
The whole thing make me think that perhaps weapon training still has a place in today's world after all.

That and learning to run like Usain Bolt!

[bailewen]

I'm finally starting to understand why the Ouigher's are so fiercely protected by Chinese law in most provinces. It's all part of the gubmint game to lead public opinion. The combination of stellare treatment of Ougher's here in Xi'an, general lack of prosecution of Ouigher crimes (such as pickpocketing and bicycle theft) combined with a repression of media sources coming out of Xingjiang has led to a general sentiment in the rest of China that the Ougher's in Xinjiang are a bunch of ungrateful violent barbarians. Most Han Chinese in Xi'an are very resentful of the special treatment that Ougher's here get from the government so it affects there view of what happens in Xinjiang.

dammit! I told myself I was going to stop commenting on local politics....

[Darth Rock&Roll]

I'm finally starting to understand why the Ouigher's are so fiercely protected by Chinese law in most provinces. It's all part of the gubmint game to lead public opinion. The combination of stellare treatment of Ougher's here in Xi'an, general lack of prosecution of Ouigher crimes (such as pickpocketing and bicycle theft) combined with a repression of media sources coming out of Xingjiang has led to a general sentiment in the rest of China that the Ougher's in Xinjiang are a bunch of ungrateful violent barbarians. Most Han Chinese in Xi'an are very resentful of the special treatment that Ougher's here get from the government so it affects there view of what happens in Xinjiang.

dammit! I told myself I was going to stop commenting on local politics....

That's odd, because the stories outside are that teh Han are getting preferential treatment and are given better economic opportunity than the Ouighers.

also, because they are Muslim, the PRC is using them as their own home grown kick about terrorists.

with the cut off of internet and communications, it casts a bad light again on the prc.

when will the prc realize that happy and free people are the most productive people, the most industrious and the most loyal and patriotic people. What they (the gov) need to learn is that in order to have good slaves, they have to believe they are free and self directed.

[bailewen]

You miss-read what I said. I think I am taking too much Chinese geography for granted.

The place where the violence is happening is waaaaaay out in the outlands of China. It's out there almost in Russia. The Ougher's get preferential treatment in the rest of the country. Xi'an is like in Kansas and Ourumoqi, where the riots are happening, would be like in Alaska or something except with no infrastructure. We are talking about the Gobi dessert here. It's frontier land. Xinjiang is like the Siberia of China except instead of snow it's with sand. It's geographically extremely removed from the population centers.

Basically, in 1949, the communists in China and in Russia sort of worked out a deal where they took all these minor (geopolitical power-wise) border states and split them up between them as a sort of a buffer zone. Mongolia was split into inner and outer and many of the central Asian states became soviet satellites and many others became Xingjiang which literally means, "new territories". China's population, as massive as it is, is mostly costal and thickest in the east and south. Xingjiang is in the north and the west. It has extremely low population density, is not very developed and is rich in natural resources like coal and natural gas which China desperately need. So China has put tremendous resources into mining those resources but then those resources mostly get shipped out to the costal population centers and even the economic benifits go to build up places like Shanghai or Shenzhen. So they are kind of treating Xingjiang like we treat Africa.

But then in those costal centers or in more inland locations like Xi'an the Ouigher's get preferential treatment. It never made sense to me before. Why do the local Ouigher's get preferential treatment but they all have horror stories to share with me privately? They basically get the royal carpet in Xi'an (which has a very significant Ouigher population) but then they get shit on in their home province. Do you see what's going on?

It's not like most Han have actually been to Xinjiang. Until recently you couldn't really fly there and the train took almost 3 days. When I went there in 2001'ish (I forget exactly) the train leaving Xinjiang for the rest of China only ran like once a week. To get a more Muslim city like Kashgar I had to take a train to Xinjiang and then a 10 hour bus to Kuaerle where I intented to take yet another 8 hour bus to get to Yangshisar or Kashgar. Sadly, when I was in Kuaerle some violence broke out in Kashgar similar to what's happening now and all transport in and out of the are was canceled and I never made it that far. The point being, what happens in Xinjiang may as well be in a totally different country. By giving them preferential treatment in the more populous areas, they build public support for their actions in the outlying areas and they undermine the credibility of Ouigher claims of mistreatment.

[Bill]

According to this months Scientific American

Xinjiang is the region where China does its above ground nuclear testing. In the 70's nuclear fallout used to rain down on the people there. The Uigers, for the past 20 years have had cancer rates 30 times the surrounding area population.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

The French, Americans, Russians and Chinese are probably responsible for most of the lung and skin cancer on the planet due to their nuclear testing.

1 speck of ingested fallout = instant cancer

The fallout from hundreds of above ground tests has polluted virtually the entire atmosphere.

we is fizzucked from it.

[AllanF]

Other special treatment the minority groups get is they are allowed to have more than one kid. Again this help reinforce Omar's point.

[Wuyizidi]

I was just thinking the other day: if China's official news agency is reporting that many dead, most likely majority of them are Han. Because if it's the other way around, we'd hear very little. The Chinese government is probably waiting for western media to cry "communist massacre", and then it will show most killed are Han. Then it would play to western fear of Muslims ("look, terrorists are killing our civilians. Next time don't bother us when it comes to Xinjiang issues.")

Like others have said, situations like this are very complex. On an individual level, the Han people who goes to Tibet and Xinjiang tend to be the poorest of poor. Those places are very remote and inhospitable, with little natural resources that local people can develop (the reason they have been historically poor). The government doesn't want to give up those lands because with today's technologies those natural resources can be reached (think Middle East in the late 1800's & early 1900's).

Sure enough, today in New York Times, which almost never print any sympathetic story about non-Han Chinese, did a profile of this Han couple who lost a son in the riot. At least in this story we don't see any signs of preferential treatment:



Poor Migrants Describe Grief From China’s Strife

URUMQI, China — As young Uighurs rampaged through the streets of this western regional capital on Sunday, Zhang Aiying rushed home and stashed her fruit cart away, safe from the mob. But there was no sign of her son, who had ventured back into the chaos to retrieve another of the family’s carts.

“Call him on his cellphone,” Ms. Zhang, 46, recalled shouting to a cousin. “Tell him we want him home. We don’t need him to go back.”

Her son, Lu Huakun, did not answer the call. Three hours later, after the screaming had died down, Ms. Zhang went out into the street. A dozen bodies were strewn about. She found her son, his head covered with blood, his left arm nearly severed into three pieces.

The killing of Mr. Lu, 25, was a ruinous end to the journey of a family that had fled their poor farming village in central China more than a decade ago to forge a new life here in China’s remote desert region.

Mr. Lu and his parents are typical of the many Han migrants who, at the encouragement of the Chinese government, have settled among the Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking race that is the largest ethnic group in oil-rich region of Xinjiang. The influx of Han, the dominant ethnic group in China, has transformed Xinjiang: the percentage of Han in the population was 40 percent in 2000, up from 6 percent in 1949.

“We wanted to do business,” Lu Sifeng, 47, the father, said Tuesday, his eyes glistening with tears as he sat smoking on his bed. “There was a calling by the government to develop the west. This place would be nothing without the Han.”

But migration has fueled ethnic tensions, as Uighurs complain about the loss of jobs, the proliferation of Han-owned businesses and the disintegration of their own culture.

On Sunday, Mr. Lu was among at least 156 people killed in the deadliest ethnic violence in China in decades. Raging Uighurs battled security forces and attacked Han civilians across Urumqi.

The riot had evolved from a protest march held by more than 1,000 Uighurs to demand that the government investigate an earlier brawl between Han and Uighurs in southern China.

The government, apparently hoping to tamp down racial violence, has not released a breakdown of the ethnicities of the 156 dead. But Mr. Lu’s father said that of more than 100 photographs of bodies that he looked through at a police station to identify his son, the vast majority were Han Chinese, most with their heads cut or smashed.

Each victim had a number. His son was 51.

“Of course, in recent days, we’ve been angry toward the Uighur,” Mr. Lu said. “And of course we’re scared of them.”

The family came from Zhoukou, in Henan Province, a poor part of central China. They grew wheat, corn and soybeans on a tiny plot of land. There was little money in it, and the parents heard of a way out: friends from Henan had gone to distant Xinjiang and were making enough money to support relatives back home.

It was the late 1990s, and the central government had announced a push to develop the west, promising that investment would soon flow to those long-neglected lands.

Mr. Lu and Ms. Zhang went first. The younger Mr. Lu followed after graduating from junior high school.

Others from Henan were selling fruit and vegetables, so the Lu family bought wooden fruit carts. They got a spot at an open-air market off Dawan North Road, on the border between Han and Uighur neighborhoods. Every day, they pushed their carts to work at 8 a.m. and did not shut down until midnight. In a good month, the family earned $300.

“He wasn’t so satisfied with life here,” Ms. Zhang said of her son. “He was so tired here, and there wasn’t so much money.”

Not a day went by that they did not miss their hometown, Ms. Zhang said. But until this past winter, they had never returned for a visit. They wanted to save the cost of train tickets.

They live in bare concrete rooms on the ground floor of an apartment block opposite the market. The kitchen has a makeshift two-burner stove a few feet from the parents’ bed. Most of their neighbors are fellow settlers from Henan and Sichuan.

At the market, about three-quarters of the 200 vendors are from those two provinces, the parents said. A handful of Uighurs sold fruit or raw mutton.

“Relations with the Uighurs were pretty good,” Ms. Zhang said. “There was a mutton stall beside the cart where my son sold fruit. On nights when my son didn’t want to bring his fruit home, he would ask the Uighur neighbor to keep the fruit inside his stall.”

This past winter, the family took the nearly 40-hour train ride home for the first time. The parents had arranged for Mr. Lu to marry a 23-year-old woman from home. The couple had photographs taken: Mr. Lu in a white turtleneck lying beside his bride-to-be in front of a beach backdrop; the smiling couple sitting on a white bench, each holding teddy bears in their laps.

The family returned to Xinjiang after scheduling the wedding for the end of this year.

On Sunday, as on any other day, Ms. Zhang, her son and a young cousin pushed four carts to the market. Mr. Lu’s father had gone to another province to buy fruit wholesale.

Abruptly at 8 p.m., the manager of the market told people to shut down. Hours earlier, more Uighurs had begun marching through the streets to protest government discrimination. Street battles erupted when riot police officers armed with tear gas and batons tried to disperse the crowd.

The first wave of the rioters arrived minutes later, metal rods and knives in hand. The younger Mr. Lu dashed home first. Ms. Zhang followed. When she got home, she found that he had gone out again to rescue another cart.

She cried for three hours until she dared go out to look for him.

“I thought, if I don’t find a body, then maybe he’s in hiding and still alive,” she said. “But I quickly found the body.”

Security forces arrived at 1 a.m. to collect the bodies. On Wednesday, Mr. Lu’s father identified his son from a photograph at a police station.

“After we cremate the body, we’ll go home with the ashes,” Ms. Zhang said.

The father stared at cigarette butts strewn across the floor. “We’ll never come back,” he said.

[grzegorz]

I'm finally starting to understand why the Ouigher's are so fiercely protected by Chinese law in most provinces. It's all part of the gubmint game to lead public opinion. The combination of stellare treatment of Ougher's here in Xi'an, general lack of prosecution of Ouigher crimes (such as pickpocketing and bicycle theft) combined with a repression of media sources coming out of Xingjiang has led to a general sentiment in the rest of China that the Ougher's in Xinjiang are a bunch of ungrateful violent barbarians. Most Han Chinese in Xi'an are very resentful of the special treatment that Ougher's here get from the government so it affects there view of what happens in Xinjiang.

dammit! I told myself I was going to stop commenting on local politics....

Ungrateful violent barbarians....you mean ungrateful for having their country invaded, their culture destroyed and becoming minorities in their own land?

Then going to the cities in the East and South to escape it all and search of the "Han promise" and start a new life in their "country" only to face racism and discrimination?

This is the video that started it all. Han Chinese beating down and killing Uygher men in the streets...You won't find this on CCTV9.

[Strange]

chines evening papers in singapore reports that all this started because of a report that a han girl was molested by uiger men in guanzhou. the girl was interviewed to find out what happened. she said she was new in the factory and wasnt familiar with the place. she somehow wandered into the men dormitory where the uigher men are staying. she said she was stunned when she opened the door; then one of them stamped his feet; and she screamed and ran away. she said she was scared and now understands that they were just teasing her and trying to tell her to go away from the men's dorm.

......

[AllanF]

Regardless of which political side you sit on i don't think anyone can justify mob violence!

The following is an article from the Timesonline July 10th 2009.

"Search for Han Chinese sister whose family were butchered by Uighurs"

What was once a grocery shop is now a blackened mess. Two boys in shorts and singlets play in the rubble but the usual occupants are absent. Five days ago a Han Chinese family was butchered in this small shop — victims of the Uighurs who rampaged through Urumqi.

Yu Dongzhi described how he clawed through the smoking ruins of the store to search for the family who lived there. He hoped to find his sister, Yu Xinli; her husband, Zhang Mingying; their 13-year-old son; her elderly mother-in-law; and a nephew aged 27.

The police helped him to dig among sacks of flour and bottles of rice wine melted by the heat of the blaze.

He found no survivors, only four bodies. He has yet to discover the fate of his sister.

Mr Yu is a heavily built man in his fifties and more than 6ft, but he almost weeps with despair. “I just hope I can find my sister in an intensive care unit of one of the hospitals. But so far, nothing.”

He has checked the mortuaries and photo galleries of unclaimed bodies held by the police, but his sister was not among them.

He has been refused access to the intensive care units. “I don’t say that I want to go in to disturb these very sick people, but why can’t they show us photographs of the injured? At least then I could find my sister,” he said.

Mr Yu cannot bear to think that she may have been dragged away by the rioters and murdered.

Just coping with the deaths of his sister’s family has almost overwhelmed him. The bodies were among the corpses whose pictures have been carried in local newspapers. So shocking was the family tragedy that one newspaper carried a special report on it, Police have confirmed the killings.

As The Times stood outside what is left of No 447 Zhongwan Street, a Han neighbour approached. She had watched the killings from her home in an apartment block overlooking the store.

“We saw hundreds of Uighurs running down the street on the afternoon of July 5. About ten suddenly rushed into the store. They began to hit the people inside, even the old mother, with bricks and stones. They tried to run outside. Then they were dragged back inside.

“There were terrible screams. Just wordless screams. But then very quickly they fell silent.”

She said that the son tried to hide in a chicken coop but was dragged out and his head was cut off. All the victims were left to burn inside the building. The corpses of the boy and his father were found beheaded. Mr Yu said: “Even the 84-year-old mother was stoned and then burnt. It was terrible, terrible. So cruel.”

Mr Yu made his way yesterday to a temporary emergency centre in an Urumqi hotel. At some desks clerks helped Han and Uighurs to process requests for compensation for damaged cars or destroyed businesses.

In a corner, two women waited at a desk for families seeking missing loved ones or reporting the deaths of relatives. This was where Mr Yu hoped to find help in the hunt for his sister. Officials were unable to explain what he could do next.

He sat in the hotel room-turned-office surrounded by relatives, just waiting. “I still have to keep up my hopes,” he said.

Mr Yu is too busy looking for his sister to organise the funerals for her family. That painful task will come next.

More than a decade ago his brother-in-law moved from central Henan province to run a successful business in a district with a high proportion of ethnic Uighur residents. “Perhaps they were jealous of his success. They clearly targeted the family. It looked as if they had decided in advance to pick on my sister. The police are pursuing the case and they have made some arrests,” said Mr Yu.

Nearby, a Uighur family run a small restaurant. The man shrugged when asked about the family who only a week ago ran a thriving business. He refused to talk about his late Han neighbours

[grzegorz]

Regardless of which political side you sit on i don't think anyone can justify mob violence!

No one is justifying mob violence. What I am saying is that riots are the result of repression.

[AllanF]

Regardless of which political side you sit on i don't think anyone can justify mob violence!

No one is justifying mob violence. What I am saying is that riots are the result of repression.

I concur and now the problem is what happens when the army etc leave? What will Urumqi be like then for those left to pick up the pieces?

[Bob]

Watching this kind of reminds me a piece I saw on Bill O'Reily's show awhile back. I think the group was called La Raza who wants the United States to give back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona because the chicanos, tejanos etc. etc. feel exploited and that the U.S. invaded and took the land from Mexico in the 1800s. I can't imagine what the National Guard would do if riots like these broke out in Texas.

I remember in the 1960s the violence in the cities when African Americans rioted and burnt down the sections they lived. Cleveland burned and National Guard troops were all over the place. The hosing of the marchers in Selma, Alabama, the Black Panthers arming themselves---I remember the picture of an armed African American on the cover of Time Magazine---they had taken over an administrative building at Cornell and were holding administrators hostage.

Look at how hotly the issue of slave reparations is here in the US. In many ways we could easily be on the brink of what we see throughout the world.

All these issues are pretty complex. If we showed a lot of these clips today, you wouldn't even recognize it as the United States.

[Bob]

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