Socialist Worker, July 9, 2009
LONG-SIMMERING grievances of China’s Muslim Uighur minority boiled over on June 6 after Chinese police attacked a peaceful demonstration in Urumqi, the capital of China’s vast western province of Xinjiang.
By the end of the evening, 158 people had been killed and 800 injured, according to Chinese officials. Official sources indicated that ethnic Chinese individuals and businesses owned by members of China’s ethnic Han majority were the main victims in the riots, but days later, officials still refused to give an ethnic breakdown of the dead or say how many had been killed by police.
Following the riot, security forces put the cities of Xinjiang under lockdown and held at least 1,500 in detention amid ominous reports of retaliatory violence by mobs of Han Chinese–who now form the majority in most of the province’s cities.
Tags: David Whitehouse, demonstration, discrimination, Guizhou riots, Han Chinese, Muslim Uighur minority, people killed and injured, police attack, Western China, Xinjiang province
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