Disappeared Uighurs

This Bystander recalls visiting the central bank in Buenos Aires a couple of years back and noticing a small plaque in the entrance in memory of  bank staff who had ‘disappeared’ during the years of the military dictatorship in Argentina. They were political dissidents, picked up by the authorities often in the dead of night, [...]

U.S. Supreme Court To Hear Gitmo Uighurs Case

The U.S. Supreme Court is to rule on whether the remaining Uighurs at the U.S.’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp can be released in the U.S. when no other country can be found to take them. Twenty-two Uighurs were captured as enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2002 but were cleared for release in 2004. [...]

Urumqi Riots Death Sentences Likely To Prompt More Protests

The death sentence imposed on a Han Chinese in connection with the fatal factory fight in Guangdong seen as the trigger of July’s ethnic riots in Urumqi was always only the prelude. Six men have now been sentenced to death for their involvement in the riots themselves, China’s most deadly violent protest in decades.
All six [...]

Urumqi Party Boss, Xinjiang Police Chief Sacked

As this Bystander expected, official heads have started to roll  over the revival of unrest in Urumqi. Li Zhi, party boss in Urumqi, has been sacked, Xinhua reports. So, too, Xinjiang police chief, Liu Yaohua. These sackings represent relatively rare cases of regional party leaders being held responsible for social unrest, but even Tibet hasn’t [...]

Mysterious Syringe Stabbings Prompt More Urumqi Protests

This Bystander has little idea about what to make of reports that Uighurs in Urumqui are stabbing Han Chinese with hypodermic syringes beyond the obvious observation that tension between the two groups remains taut.
Xinjiang TV reported that 476 people, 433 of whom were Han, has sought treatment for such stabbings. This has brought “tens of [...]

Backlash Against Chinese Workers In Africa

A backlash against Chinese investment in Asia took place in Algiers earlier this week. A dispute between migrant Chinese workers and locals over parking in the city’s ‘Chinatown’ turned ugly with about 100 people involved in a street brawl. Ten  Chinese were reported injured and five Chinese-owned shops were looted. It was an outbreak of [...]

Urumqi Update + Remarkable Mine Rescue

A couple of updates: first, Xinhua has raised the number of injured it is reporting in July 5th’s riot in Urumqi to 1,680, an increase of nearly 600. Its latest death toll remains unchanged from its midweek revision to 184, 137 Han and 46 Uighur. (Uighurs say their death toll was much higher.) The city [...]

The Kazakhstan Dimension To Unrest In Urumqi

My thanks to my correspondent (as always e-mails welcome, but please also share with all via comments) who pointed out that Tuesday’s post, Uighurs, Repression, Assimilation And The Han Islanders, gave too little weight to the question of regional instability on China’s western borders and beyond. And in particular, in Kazakhstan.
Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria are [...]

Hu Heads Home To Restore Party Credibility

President Hu Jintao’s return to China, cutting short his attendance at the G8 meeting in Italy, reinforces how seriously the Party leadership takes the challenge to its credibility caused by the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang.
Security forces will be able to reassert control, if not necessarily peace, in Urumqi, but the risk of further outbreaks there [...]

Uighurs, Repression, Assimilation And The Han Islanders

You don’t think of the Han Chinese as a beleaguered island people, whose imperial diaspora takes them to distant overseas shores, but that is one lens through which to look at recent events in Urumqi.
Last year, I squirreled away a snapshot of the map below that appeared on a financial blog by John Mauldin. It [...]