I. Background

Root Causes of the Xinjiang Protests

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region is China’s largest provincial unit, accounting for one sixth of the Chinese territory. Xinjiang is also a strategically crucial territory that borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The region has abundant oil reserves and is China’s largest natural gas and oil-producing region. It is the only region after the Tibet Autonomous Region in which ethnic Han Chinese are still a minority. The very name of the region, which translates as “New Dominion” (xin-jiang), reflects its late incorporation into the Chinese Empire in the 18th century, under the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty.

Uighurs constitute the numerically dominant ethnic group in Xinjiang,[1] yet over the past 50 years the Han Chinese population has grown from 6 to 40 percent as a result of state-encouraged and spontaneous migration from other parts of China.

Although China’s sovereignty over the region is not in dispute at an international level, many Uighurs have never fully accepted Chinese rule, and tend to view the Chinese expansion in Xinjiang as an oppressive process of assimilation. Others think that the Chinese state has made a genuine effort of accommodation by raising economic standards but insist that that the government should sanction pervasive socioeconomic discrimination, implement autonomy laws that in theory guarantee a greater say in policy-making and control over economic riches, and relax control of religious activities. Some Uighurs have chosen to join the ranks of the local bureaucracy, including the police and the army, even though all positions of real power are generally in the hands of Han cadres.

In the past decade, Xinjiang’s economy has developed rapidly, spurred by a combination of massive subsidies from Beijing; revenues from natural resources, including oil and gas;[2] and rapid urbanization. Yet Uighurs were mostly left out of the rising tide of greater prosperity. Official statistics reflect higher unemployment and poverty rates. The average life expectancy of Uighurs is about 10 years shorter than the Han segment of the population.[3] Competition for scarce land and water resources in the countryside, as well as job discrimination and mutually negative stereotypes in the urban areas have led to increased conflict and resentment. According to official Xinjiang statistics, the income gap between Han-dominated urban and Uighur-dominated rural areas widened from 2.1 times in 1980 to 3.24 times in 2007.[4]

The government’s response to the growing tensions has been to tighten already sharp limits on religious and cultural expression and suppress any sign of dissent, which it equates with “separatism,” a capital offense under Chinese law. The February 1997 uprising in the city of Yining and isolated acts of anti-state violence in 1998, which included the assassination of Uighur “collaborators,” attacks against police stations and the explosion of two bombs on Urumqi buses in February 1998, triggered a massive security crackdown against Uighurs across Xinjiang.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, China began to portray its security campaigns in Xinjiang as a contribution to the global war on terror. There is no dispute that clandestine Uighur groups have from time to time carried out violent attacks. The massive propaganda offensive about the threat of “East Turkestan” terrorism further drove Chinese public opinion against the Uighurs, who in turn felt increasingly ostracized and discriminated against because of their distinct ethnicity and Muslim faith.

The Chinese government’s accelerated attempt over the past few years to forcibly refashion Uighur identity has also fueled growing resentment. Following Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan’s declaration in 2002 that the Uighur language was “out of step with the 21st century,” the government started to shift the entire education system to Mandarin. Control over religion was extended in 2008 to prohibit traditional customs such as religious weddings, burials, or pilgrimages to the tombs of local saints.

In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing launched a new year-long security campaign against “the three evil forces”—“terrorism, religious extremism, and separatism”—which resulted in even more drastic restrictions on the religious, cultural, and political rights of Uighurs. For example, in February 2008, the government adopted new regulations prohibiting “23 types of illegal religious activities,” including praying in public or at wedding ceremonies. In March 2008 the authorities put down a large, peaceful protest against government policies in the town of Khotan (Chinese: Hetian).[5] Most recently, in early 2009, the Chinese government started razing the old city of Kashgar, the centuries-old cultural center of the Uighur civilization, and forced 50,000 families out of their old homes and into newly constructed buildings in the periphery of the city.[6]

 

The July 5-7 Protests in Urumqi

While the protests seemed to be sparked by a clash in late June 2009 between Han Chinese and Uighur workers at a toy factory in Guangdong province in southern China, which left at least two Uighurs dead, the root causes lie in the longstanding discriminatory policies of the Chinese government in the region and egregious restrictions on religious, political, educational, linguistic, and economic rights of the Uighurs.[7] Shortly thereafter, graphic footage was posted on the internet depicting Uighur factory workers allegedly being beaten to death by Chinese co-workers.[8] Many Uighurs in Xinjiang saw the footage as emblematic of the discrimination they suffer within China, and of the government’s unwillingness to protect them.

While many questions about the protests remain unanswered to date, most accounts seem to agree on the following outline of events.[9]

On the afternoon of July 5, 2009, hundreds of Uighurs launched an apparently peaceful protest at People’s Square in the center of Urumqi. The protesters demanded an investigation into the killing of the Uighur workers at the Guangdong toy factory.[10]

Riot police moved in to disperse the protest. Official reports indicate that 70 demonstrators were arrested on the spot.[11]Some reports suggest that the police used batons to beat the demonstrators.[12]The protest then moved southward into predominantly Uighur areas, including the Grand Bazaar, a large shopping center. Within hours, the crowd abandoned its peaceful approach and instead launched into a spree of savage vandalism and killings of Han Chinese residents of Urumqi. It remains unclear what triggered the shift to violence. Chinese sources claim it was a premeditated attack, while Uighur sources blame excessive use of force by the police that enraged the protestors.

There is little doubt, however, that in the evening hours of July 5, large groups of Uighur youth, armed with clubs, knives, and stones, launched brutal attacks in parts of the Uighur quarter and in poor mixed areas of south Urumqi. They randomly attacked Han Chinese residents, including women, children, and elderly, leaving scores dead or injured. The attackers also set dozens of houses, businesses, buses, and cars on fire, and ransacked shops.

The security forces seemed slow in their response to the wave of violence—witness accounts suggest that in some neighborhoods, forces only arrived hours after the attacks.[13] In others, they were apparently outnumbered by the attackers. The authorities did not reestablish control until the early hours of July 6, when an additional 20,000 security forces, including police, paramilitary armed police, and the military, flooded the city.

Despite the heavy security presence, on July 7, 2009, Han Chinese started mobilizing for retaliatory attacks, and marched, armed with knives, hammers and wooden clubs, toward the Uighur areas of the city. The security forces seemed to have managed to stop most of the crowds, yet some Uighurs fell victim to these attacks.[14]

The latest casualty figures released by the Chinese authorities in August 2009 put the death toll from the protests at 197 people. The authorities said that 156 of the victims were “civilians,” including 134 Han Chinese, 11 from the Hui ethnic group, 10 Uighurs, and one from the Manchu ethnic group.[15]Twelve others were reportedly shot by the security forces “while committing violence or criminal activities,” and the identities of the remainder had yet to be determined. More than 1,600 were injured.[16]

Overseas Uighur advocates, however, continue to question the official death toll, saying it underestimates the number of Uighurs killed both by paramilitary police and during retaliatory attacks by the Han. In a number of public statements, Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer claimed that 400 Uighurs had been killed in Urumqi, and a further 100 in Kashgar.[17] In a statement released on July 7, the World Uyghur Congress alleged that Chinese paramilitary forces “killed an estimated number of 800 young Uyghurs.”[18] Human Rights Watch was unable to collect sufficient information on the killings to verify these claims.

Chinese authorities were quick to accuse a variety of external forces, ranging from al Qaeda to the United States Congress, of masterminding and sponsoring the unrest. In particular, they focused on blaming Rebiya Kadeer, a former political prisoner in Xinjiang and now a prominent Uighur rights activist in the United States, for planning and organizing the protests.[19] No evidence has been provided to support those claims, which Kadeer denied.

China’s Record of Unaccounted-for Detentions and Due Process Violations

Concern for the fate of hundreds of people detained in the aftermath of the Urumqi protests is aggravated by China’s appalling record with respect to unaccounted-for detentions, summary trials without the benefit of due process, and reports of torture and ill-treatment in custody.

These abuses characterized the previous incidents of unrest in Xinjiang, such as the February 1997 uprising in Yining, a city 300 kilometers west of Urumqi,[20] as well as the 2008 mass protests in Tibet.

The crackdown after the 1997 Yining incident led to thousands of arrests. Operating on the principle of “the two basics”—which stipulated that only “basic truth” and “basic evidence” was required to process the case—law enforcement agencies and courts widely used procedures that fell far short of internationally accepted standards of due process.[21]

Several years of “anti-separatism” campaigns that followed the 1997 protests resulted in close to 200 executions.[22] Facilities of the Xinjiang Reeducation-Through-Labor system—which allows for imprisonment for up to three years without judicial processes—overflowed with new detainees,[23] and several dozen people arrested for alleged separatist activities between 1997 and 2000 reportedly are still missing.[24]

In 2008, following demonstrations in Tibet in March, the Chinese government pledged to deal with any illegal activity in a manner consistent with the rule of law. Yet within months Human Rights Watch had documented hundreds of arbitrary arrests and dozens of cases related to those protests summarily pushed through the legal system, with minimal access to defense counsel and other due process violations.[25]

Human Rights Watch research showed that the number of arrests following the Tibet protests was considerably higher than the government acknowledged and many arrests were disguised as “voluntary surrenders” (using legal technicalities that count suspects who confess crimes before they are formally arrested as voluntary surrenders). Security forces deliberately failed to notify relatives of the whereabouts of the detainees, and the courts, mostly in closed trials, sentenced protesters under state security charges for nonviolent acts such as waving the Tibetan flag and throwing pamphlets on the street.[26] To date the government has not provided a full accounting of all those detained, released, tried, and sentenced in the aftermath of the 2008 protests.

After the 2008 Tibet demonstrations, six United Nations special procedures mandate holders issued an urgent appeal calling on the government of China to ensure “complete compliance with due process and fair trial rights according to international standards for those detained or charged with crimes, including provision of each person’s name, the charges against them, and the facility where they are detained or imprisoned, as well as ensuring access to legal defense.”[27]

Yet these appeals, as well as the calls from Human Rights Watch, other international organizations, and China’s international counterparts, remained unanswered, and credible reports of torture and “disappearances” of Tibetans have continued to emerge to date.

 

Government Control of Information in the Aftermath of the Xinjiang Protests

In the aftermath of the Urumqi protests, Chinese authorities sought to tightly control the flow of information out of the region.

Within hours of the protests, internet access was cut across Xinjiang;[28] incoming and outgoing international telephone calls were blocked; and within 48 hours text messaging services were also suspended.

Real-time reports from Urumqi posted on the web were removed in a matter of minutes, according to people who were monitoring the situation on the web at the time of the unrest. The web publishers had to exercise painstaking self-censorship in their reporting on the events, knowing that otherwise their entire websites would be blocked.[29]

Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) condemned the blocking of more than 50 online Uighur forums and online discussion groups, including Uyghur Online, as well as social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and MSN messenger.[30] While the authorities claimed the move was necessary to prevent communication between the rioters, it mainly served to eliminate alternative sources of information.

In contrast to the Tibet protests in 2008, however, the authorities allowed foreign journalists access to Urumqi, set up a press center to facilitate their work, and held regular news briefings with local authorities. In an effort to demonstrate their commitment to transparency, the national and provincial propaganda officials announced that they have “resolutely implemented the central authorities’ demand for open and orderly newsgathering by overseas reporters and strived to provide service and exercise supervision according to the law.”[31]

Foreign journalists were able to conduct interviews with victims and witnesses of the violence, but they had limited access to other information, in particular, about the arrests that followed the protests. Those who sought information beyond what the government was willing to share were stopped, and, in some cases, detained and escorted out of the region.

For example, a reporter for Radio Free Asia was detained when she tried to take photos of police detaining Uighurs near the Urumqi Grand Bazaar.[32] Another group of foreign journalists were detained while they were covering the Uighur protest on July 10, 2009, when the government refused to open mosques in Urumqi for Friday prayers.[33] Journalists who tried to visit Kashgar, another town where Uighur protests reportedly had taken place, were promptly detained, escorted to the airport and ordered to leave.[34]

Official Chinese publications repeatedly accused Western media of biased and misguided reporting on the protests, expressing particular outrage with reports that linked the long-term grievances of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang to the outbreak of violence.[35] At the same time, Chinese authorities used both the official media and other means of mass propaganda to promote the government version of events and downplay the ethnic nature of the protests. CCTV, Xinhua News Agency, and other Chinese media carried numerous reports of Uighur violence along with commentary suggesting that the violence was instigated from abroad.

Within days of the unrest, the streets of Urumqi were covered in red banners calling for ethnic unity, condemning separatism, and encouraging residents to report those suspected of engaging in violence. The same messages were constantly transmitted through loudspeakers installed on numerous military trucks and police vehicles patrolling the city.