Posted on 07/11/2009 9:42:17 AM PDT by traumer
Racial killings and heavy-handed policing stir up a repressed and dangerous province
IT BEGAN as a protest about a brawl at the other end of the country; it became China’s bloodiest incident of civil unrest since the massacre that ended the Tiananmen Square protests 20 years ago. The ethnic Uighurs in the far western city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, accused Han Chinese factory workers in the southern province of Guangdong of racial violence against Uighur co-workers. By the time Urumqi’s Uighurs had finished venting their anger, more than 150 people were dead and hundreds more injured.
Much is still unknown about what happened on the afternoon of July 5th. A protest by several hundred people in the city’s central plaza, People’s Square, moved southward into Uighur areas, including the Grand Bazaar, a large shopping centre. Somehow—perhaps, overseas Uighur activists say, because the police opened fire—it became an explosion of anger, in which random Chinese were clubbed and stoned to death.
Xinjiang is no stranger to unrest among its more than 8m Uighurs (about 45% of the population according to official figures, which tend to undercount Han Chinese migrants from elsewhere in the country). Many Uighurs resent rule by China, which they accuse of trampling on their Muslim Central Asian culture.
It is not clear why the police failed to stop the killings, nor how many of the deaths were caused by the security forces themselves. Uighur exiles gave far higher estimates of the numbers killed, which they said included many Uighurs.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Probably.
Of course nobody is going to call this "imperialism". Communist countries can't be imperialist. Only American can be these days.
China has been an empire held together by force of arms for 1700 years.
Why would today be different than yesterday.
Do the Chicoms still have the mandate of heaven? That’s the important question.
China is flooding sparsely populated ares of their country with ethnic Han Chinese to make those outlying provinces more politically and culturally Chinese. Lots of ethnic minorities the world over are asserting their desire to have politically independent enclaves separate from the ruling ethnic culture that they currently belong to. In the US, it’s pretty much the reverse: ethnic minorities are flooding into the country and bringing down the percentage of the majority population.
Our government is largely punting on such issues in the Southwest. Beijing is nipping such dreams in the bud in theirs.
Good contrast.
Yea - they know the risk of what Islamic minorities could do...and they will not tolerate it.
...as Europe counts down its final days.
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