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NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2009
World in View
Uighurs' protest
A deadly race riot in a factory in Southeast China spurred uprisings by ethnic Uighurs in their home province of Xinjiang thousands of miles away and spotlighted the long-suppressed movement for Uighur self-determination. Rumors claiming Uighur workers had raped two Chinese girls incited a mob of over a thousand ethnic Han Chinese on the night of June 25 to brutally attack Uighur workers, and beat two of them to death, in Shaoguan at the world's largest toy factory.
When news of this atrocity reached Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, thousands of Uighurs, the Turkic people until recent times overwhelmingly dominant in the region though controlled by China's central government, began peaceful demonstrations on July 5 which targeted government facilities and shops, and cars of the ethnic Han Chinese who had poured into Urumqi and the province as a whole. In reaction, security forces and armed Han Chinese killed over 150 Uighurs, and thousands were locked up.
With so many demonstrators killed, wounded or jailed, the government invited journalists to witness the outcome, only to find demonstrations continuing. Women, with or without Muslim headscarves, frequently led them, demanding release of prisoners and access to mosques. It was appropriate that women were visible leading actual demonstrations, even as the Chinese government claimed that the long-exiled Uighur woman Rebiya Kadeer was behind every local action. It is young women who form the bulk of the migrant workforce, pushed by economics and government policy into jobs in factories like the Shaoguan toy factory where the original atrocity against Uighur workers occurred.
China has undermined Uighur culture by restricting teaching of the Uighur language in schools and by controlling Muslim religious practice. The policy of Han Chinese immigration has overwhelmed the Uighur population, leaving them strangers in their own land in large areas of Xinjiang.
--Bob McGuire
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