Word: uighurs
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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...
...reporters interviewed residents of the area, a Uighur woman with two children stumbled past sobbing. The woman said she was bereft over the disappearance of her husband. Soon after, a dozen Uighur women emerged from a market, marching down a four-lane road and chanting slogans. The journalists and cameras followed, and soon the protesters - mostly women and children but some men as well - swelled to about 300 as Foreign Ministry minders stood aside, watching helplessly...
...Gladney, a professor of anthropology at Pomona College in California and an author of numerous articles and books on the region, said it was particularly notable that Sunday's protests took place in Urumqi, where Uighurs make up a tiny proportion of the population. "Urumqi is the center of Chinese power and influence in Xinjiang, and there haven't been any protests there since the early '90s, which makes this very, very unusual," said Gladney. Bequelin of Human Rights Watch concurred, noting that not only is the Uighur population small, but also that the city was already under very tight...
...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...
...Alim denied that either factor lay at the root of the eruption of anger. "The real cause," he says, "is six 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...