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.
Official Chinese accounts blame these events on separatist agitation inspired by exile groups, whereas Uighur sources say they were triggered by the racist murder of two Uighur workers falsely accused of rape in Guangdong, southern China last month. The scale of the violence and the number of casualties reveal a deep resentment, including a growing fear among many Uighurs that Beijing has a long-term policy to assimilate them culturally. Together with the state’s charges of separatism that makes comparisons with Tibet inevitable, although Xinjiang lacks the geographical integrity and external support the Tibetans have used to promote their cause.
Both provinces are suffering from the deep-rooted centralism of China’s political system and its determination to head off any hint of separatist sentiment. In Xinjiang that sentiment is now likely to be boosted as a result of these events, unless there is a real effort to account for them honestly and independently. To demand cultural autonomy and rights is not at all the same thing. Any society exposed to such rapid immigration and social change is bound to react negatively.
If the main response is repression, the problem will grow in coming years. This is another example of the real test of China’s political system as it adjusts to the effects of stretching economic growth to the limits.