Word: hanful
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Thousands of Han residents armed with clubs poured onto the streets of Urumqi on July 7, raising the risk of more racial violence in this western Chinese city. Just two days ago, the Xinjiang capital was thrown into chaos when protests by more than 1,000 members of the Uighur minority turned into a riot. Sunday's events left 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, the deadliest eruption of public violence in China since People's Liberation Army soldiers killed several hundred people during the 1989 crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The club-wielding...
...Sunday's Urumqi riot was triggered by unrest in the southern coastal province of Guangdong, where a disgruntled former factory worker started a rumor that a group of Uighur workers had raped two Han women. That touched off a riot on June 26 that left two Uighur workers dead. Police later arrested the man who had started the rumor. This week's protest began as a peaceful demonstration by a group of about 1,000 Uighurs angered by the Guangdong riot. Witnesses said they shouted slogans in Uighur and Mandarin denouncing discrimination. (See TIME's China covers...
...Alim said the demonstrations were a reaction to a June 26 incident at a factory in Guangdong province, where two Uighur workers were beaten to death by Han Chinese colleagues. "The mob in Guangdong beat and killed Uighurs with immunity," Alim said. "The security forces didn't arrest anyone and did absolutely nothing. The protesters were very angry and disappointed." Alim added that the WUC believed that more than two Uighurs may have died in the Guangdong incident...
...Economic factors probably played a role in the protests, said Gladney, in part because of frustration among the large numbers of young Uighur men who cannot find work, a situation they often blame on the large influx of Han from other parts of China, whom they believe are given preferential treatment by both private and government employers. Gladney said he also believes that the street protests in Tehran and other Iranian cities that followed the recent presidential election there may have influenced protesters in Urumqi...
...decades of heavy-handed repression by the Chinese government in Xinjiang that has reduced Uighurs to second-class citizens in their own homeland. If we speak up, we get killed. If we don't speak up, we will be wiped out as a people in a few decades" by Han Chinese immigration and forced assimilation. Bequelin said the feeling of helplessness and desperation conveyed by those words gives a strong indication of the forces driving the Uighur protesters. "You could say they were suicidal," Bequelin said. "They knew the terrible consequences of protesting for themselves and their families...