Guo Jianxin surveyed the wreckage of his car dealership in Urumqi and reflected on the violence that left at least 156 people dead in the northwestern Chinese city.
“Most Uighurs are good people,” said Guo, after rioters from the mostly Muslim ethnic group burned 30 of the domestic cars he sells and smashed another 23, causing an estimated 3 million yuan ($440,000) of damage. “There are just a few rotten apples.”
The plight of Guo, a member of the Hui minority, highlights the ethnic tensions that have boiled over into China’s deadliest violence in decades. The clashes have pitted Uighurs, Turkic- speaking natives of Xinjiang province, against the dominant Han Chinese and ethnically similar Hui group.
China’s drive to develop Xinjiang’s resources has spurred an influx of migrants and bred resentment among Uighurs, who complain of discrimination and political and cultural repression. Han Chinese now account for half the province’s 21 million population, from 7 per cent in the 1953 census.
“We never had any political rights,” said Kurban Haiyur, a Uighur exile who left the province in 2006 to study in Germany. “In my whole life, I never had the same status in society as a Han Chinese.”
Han mobs fought Uighurs with machetes, sticks and makeshift weapons in Urumqi on Wednesday, defying hundreds of military police as the violence entered a fourth day. The clashes prompted President Hu Jintao to cut short a visit to the Group of Eight summit in Italy.
“I’m terrified of going out at night,” said Yi, a 70- year-old woman who moved to Xinjiang from the eastern province of Jiangsu 50 years ago and would only give her surname for fear of retaliation. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my five decades here.”
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The trigger for the riot was a demonstration over the deaths of migrant Uighur workers last month in a factory in Guangdong, thousands of kilometers to the south.
The official death toll makes the violence among the most deadly since possibly the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, though thousands may have died in the 1989 crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, according to pro-democracy groups.
The official number of deaths in the demonstrations that broke out in Lhasa, capital of Tibet, in March last year was 19.
Unofficial estimates put the figure at about 200. The government cast those riots as violence directed at Han Chinese and Hui.
China has poured investment into Xinjiang and Tibet in an attempt to placate its restive western territories and close the gap in economic development with wealthier eastern provinces. The central government has spent 1 trillion yuan on 70 infrastructure projects in the five years through 2005 under a “Go West” policy adopted in 2000.
China also has affirmative action policies for its 55 ethnic minorities, awarding them extra points on examination scores that determine university entrance and exempting them from the nation’s one-child policy. That hasn’t satisfied some Uighurs, who say most economic benefits go to Han migrants while the local way of life is trampled.
“The Han don’t have enough sensitivity to Uighur culture and the Uighurs feel their culture is being eroded,” said Colin Mackerras, a professor at Australia’s Griffith University and author of “China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalization.” “Some of them feel it’s being destroyed.”
Han Chinese account for more than 90 per cent of China’s 1.3 billion people, the world’s largest population, and dominate the government of the Communist-ruled country.
“At school, we were never allowed to wear the traditional Uighur hat as the Chinese saw it as a threat to them if we showed our national identity,” said Haiyur, the Uighur exile. Uighurs were prevented from celebrating a traditional festival, banned from gathering in public and forced to learn Chinese, he said.
“Almost all the factories in Xinjiang are Chinese-owned,” Haiyur said. “Often you would find a big poster outside the factories saying ‘We don’t need ethnic minorities for this position.’”
The landlocked province, about three times the size of France, has China’s second-biggest oil and natural gas reserves and was the biggest cotton producer as of 2007. Per-capita annual income of rural households was 3,183 yuan, against a national average of 4,140 yuan.
Chinese stocks rose today, with the Shanghai Composite index closing 1.4 percent higher at 3123. The measure has gained 69 per cent this year, the world’s best-performing major market.
“The situation is pretty much contained, not having a major impact on the national economy, unless it spills over to other parts of China or triggers policy reversals,” said Fan Cheuk Wan, head of Asia Pacific research in Hong Kong at Credit Suisse Private Banking, which oversees about $50 billion in the region.
The nation’s economy will probably grow at a 7.5 per cent annual rate this year, compared with 9 per cent last year, the International Monetary Fund predicts. Xinjiang’s economy accounted for 1.4 per cent of China’s gross domestic product in 2008.
China’s government has accused the World Uighur Congress, a Munich-based exile organization, of orchestrating this week’s violence, echoing its blaming of the exiled Dalai Lama for last year’s clashes in Tibet. Xinjiang police said they had evidence that congress leader Rebiya Kadeer masterminded the riot, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
The World Uighur Congress, in turn, has accused the Chinese government of trying to deflect blame for problems caused by its “systematic abuse.”
“The events of the last few days show that the government is right to be sensitive about Xinjiang,” said Calla Wiemer, a visiting fellow at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute. “In the general context of China, when there aren’t avenues for the expression of grievances and repression, it all just simmers ready to explode.”
That explosion has left car dealer Guo ruing the destruction of a business that took him eight years to build. “Look around, the only reason we were attacked is because we’re Huis,” lamented his wife, surnamed Tian.
Guo said he will have to think about whether to start again. “I’m a bit concerned about the security situation.”