The China Story- Riots in Urumqi.

Remember the clashes in China? Urumqi, to be precise- this is a post about what has happened there- we googled and got some links, and we went through them, because we knew next to nothing except that there has been a riot there and people have been killed.

The clash is between minoriry Uighur Muslims and Han Chinese- both sides are blaming each other for what has happened.

According to The Big Picture in Boston.com,

On Sunday, July 5th in Urumqi, the capital of China's western Xinjiang region, thousands of minority ethnic Uighur residents marched, demanding a government investigation into an earlier incident - a brawl between Han Chinese and Uighurs in a toy factory in Shaoguan that ended with at least two Uighur deaths.

We can safely say that rumours were the spark that fomented this fire.

The Big Picture tells its story through pictures, and some of them are,

Interesting for us is the comment number 94,

What's wrong with the world ? Muslim needs respect & job.

I am in Delhi. Muslims plan to build a mosque in a area where there is no mosque and the whole neighborhood came against of it . Why ?? we just need basic right to live and earn.

Posted by Tanvir July 9, 09 04:17 AM

Let us leave that alone.

There are 56 ethnic groups in China, reports The Washington Post, and if you are interested kn the tension between them, you should read the article A Guide to China's Ethnic Groups.

Is there racism in China or not? From what we know of the human condition, we would bet that it exists, healthy and thriving, but there are lessons to be learnt, not only for the Chinese, but the whole world:

The truth is, there is racism here as surely as there is race. This is, in fact, unavoidable. But there is an important message behind the violence that has taken place in Urumqi, one that should not be lost, and that is: in order for multiple cultures to exist harmoniously in one country, there needs first to be a self-awareness, an awareness of prejudice and the roots. It does no one any good to simply say “but there is no prejudice!” Certainly thousands of people would not have taken to the streets over an imagined slight. It is possible that sometimes the authorities, being human and having their own biases, might sometimes allow those biases to get in the way of their judgment. When biases translate into action, that is racism, (and its relatives, classism, and sexism). The mistake is for any country, anywhere in the world, to assume that these biases don’t exist and to declare racism extinct, for it exists, and when ignored the consequences can be deadly, for all sides of the equation.

-eChinacities, "Is There Really No Racism in China?"

The cause of the riots at this instance, we do not know, but it is discussed here:

Two divergent narratives now seem to be unfolding. The best place to see an evolving digest of Chinese and Western coverage in one place is at EastSouthWestNorth. However, to summarize, in the broad Western media narrative, Uighurs ground down by decades of colonial oppression and incited by racism have erupted in rebellion. In the one told by Chinese media, "splittists" let by the Uighur exile Rebiyah Kadeer have engineered an outbreak of groundless violence (中) directed largely at innocent ethnic Han.

-Imagethief, "Riots in Xinjiang and the price of omission"

China is blaming rumours, and as could be expected from totalitarian states, it has gone into overdrive- as you can see from this blog post:

...Rebiya Kadeer, a former Chinese government official living in the US, is accused of masterminding the chaos in Xinjiang. The danger has spread to sexagenarian women! While the Xinjiang riots seemed to have no specific political purpose, but rather just huge masses of angry young people tragically out of control, China was smart enough to see through this ruse, right to its post-menopausal root. Her age? 62. I know, she’s not that old, but apparently she’s crossed the age threshold that tends to turn people into the type of violent anarchists that capture the hearts of youths. And she can do it concisely, in words that to the casual observer would not indicate violence. But according to China Daily, the government claims it has proof!"

-Cup of Cha, Chinese Government Fears Old People

Apart from blaming exiles, and other sundry entities, and restoring law and order, the Chinese Government banned some social sites, stating they too caused the problems:

The recent racial riots in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China have triggered the shutdown of several social media sites and blogs, notably Facebook, Twitter, Fanfou (Chinese version of Twitter), Danwei.org, and more. This follows a similar Twitter blackout a few weeks back, prompting the question whether some level of control and censorship is required in the Chinese Social Media scene.

-Southern China Community, "Maybe Jackie Chan was right about Chinese needing to be controlled"

This is supportive of the ban on social sites, but not in a blinkered way- it explores the question and finds the answers that it does.
If you want to keep a watch on this, you can do no better than follow this link to EastSouthWestNorth: "The Urumqi Mass Incident - Part 2". It is constantly being updated- but the download is likely to be quite heavy.

As of now,

China has raised the death toll from ethnic rioting in its far west to 184 and detailed for the first time the ethnicity of those killed, while tension lingered over the city at the center of the strife.

The official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday that 137 of those killed in the mayhem on July 5 in Urumqi, regional capital of Xinjiang, were Han Chinese, who form the majority of China's 1.3 billion population, including 111 men and 26 women.

Forty-six were Uighurs, the largely Muslim people of Xinjiang who share cultural bonds with Central Asian peoples. All but one of them were men. Uighurs make up 46 percent of Xinjiang's 21.3 million people, according to government statistics.

reports Reuters.

Let's see how this one plays out.