By Richard McGregor and Kathrin Hille in Beijing
Only hours after the weekend’s bloody clashes in Urumqi and well before the authorities announced the horrendous death toll, Beijing had unequivocally named the perpetrators of the unrest in the capital of its northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, blamed what it called the “pre-meditated and organised violence” on exiled leaders of the Uighurs, the predominant Muslim people in the region.
Xinhua, quoting an anonymous government official, singled out as the mastermind Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur businesswoman who was jailed for alleged separatist activities in 1999 before being banished into exile in the US six years later.
The branding of the violence as foreign-instigated, with the aim of splitting the region off from China to form an independent state, has sinister echoes of Beijing’s handling of rioting in Tibet early last year.
“If it follows the Tibet pattern, at this stage the Chinese media will only release figures of those allegedly killed by protesters,” said Robert Barnett, a lecturer on Tibet at Columbia University in New York. “We’re seeing again the same news management method, which is to try and pre-empt foreign press reports by rapidly releasing news that is damaging to government critics, especially any images of violence by protesters and any evidence of foreign links.”
In a display of its technical prowess, Beijing on Monday took down the internet in Urumqi and also restricted outgoing mobile phone calls to limit information flowing out of the region to the wider world.
Xinjiang, like Tibet, has a population that is ethnically distinct from the country’s Han Chinese majority. In both regions, indigenous residents rail against strict controls over religious expression and growing Han Chinese dominance of the economy.
The charge from Beijing that the violence was caused by outsiders seeking independence has the short-term effect of killing any discussion within China about possible grievances underlying the riots.
“Everything is framed through the sovereignty issue,” said Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. “No expression of dissent is legitimate. It is all seen as part of a plot.”
The protesters marching in Urumqi on Sunday were demonstrating against the deaths of two Uighurs in clashes with Han Chinese at a factory in Guangdong province near Hong Kong late last month.
But the Uighurs have long been hostile to the ruling Communist party, which they say restricts families worshipping together at mosques, stifles their culture and ensures most of the benefits of economic development go to Han Chinese.
Xinjiang is a strategically and economically important region for China, rich in resources, with large and productive farmlands. It is also the transit point for a growing number of gas and oil pipelines from central Asia.
Xinjiang saw an inflow of 1.2m workers from other parts of China last year alone, according to state media reports, mainly to work in the region’s booming oil and resources industry. The region’s population of 20m includes some 8.3m Uighurs.
The redevelopment of old towns and the influx of richer Han Chinese radically changed local economic structures, costing many Uighurs their traditional jobs and forcing them to move to Urumqi or to other provinces to search for work.
This has happened while Xinjiang’s economy has been growing at more than 11 per cent a year for the past six years, above the national average. The wealth created by this rapid growth has concentrated in the pockets of new immigrants, increasing the gap between rich and poor, Han and Uighur, some locals complain.
Adi, a Uighur working in the tourism industry in Kashgar, China’s last outpost in Xinjiang before the border with Pakistan, has seen three siblings leave for eastern China for work over the past five years.
“The family used to depend on my father’s small trading business, but he had to close it down because there are increasingly larger, newer shops now,” Adi, who asked that his full name not be used, said on Monday.
Behind the scenes, the Chinese authorities will be deeply concerned at how the street marches in Urumqi degenerated into bloody and murderous clashes.
China has large and diverse security forces stationed in Urumqi and around Xinjiang, including units of the People’s Liberation Army and the para-military People’s Armed Police as well as ordinary police and anti-riot units.
In spite of their brutal image, China has attempted to professionalise police and paramilitary forces and train them to limit the use of violence in controlling protests.
Barry Sautman, an associate professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautioned against seeing the riots solely as a reaction against China’s ethnic policies.
“In China, there are lots of protests every day, some of them on a large scale, although they don’t generally take the form of beating people to death in the streets,” he said.
In a statement Monday, the World Uyghur Congress, of which Ms Kadeer is the president, condemned the crackdown on protesters and poured scorn on Chinese claims that it had been instigated from outside the country.
“The Chinese authorities should acknowledge that the peaceful protests were sparked by the unlawful mob beating and killing of Uighur workers at a Guangdong toy factory more than a week ago,” the group said.
“The authorities should also acknowledge that their failure to take any meaningful action to punish the Chinese mob for the brutal murder of Uighurs is the real cause of this protest.”
