Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

THE DEATHS of at least 140 people during riots over the weekend in Urumqi, capital of the Chinese province of Xinjiang, makes this one of the most serious clashes to have occurred in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Yesterday’s dramatic scaling up of the deaths from three to 140, together with the many injured and arrested and a crackdown on news from the city makes it imperative that an independent inquiry is held into it, as called for by Amnesty International.

Urumqi is 1,875 miles from Beijing and the capital of a vast but sparsely populated and resource-rich province bordering on eight central Asian states. In recent years there has been a strong immigration of Han people (China’s predominant ethnic group) into Xinjiang, so that they now number 41 per cent of its 19 million population compared to 45 per cent of its native Uighur people. Inevitably the Uighurs resent this. They say it is accompanied by a widening income gap with the Han immigrants, a crowding out of their culture and Muslim religion, and increasingly by competition for water and land in rural parts of the vast territory. Oil, gas and pipeline resources are further ingredients of resentment.