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By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH
SHANGHAI -- Hundreds of Muslim ethnic minority demonstrators clashed with armed police Sunday in northwest China in riots that left a number of people dead and cars and shops smashed and burned.

China's state-run Xinhua news agency said "a number of civilians" as well as one police officer were killed in battles between protestors and police on the streets of Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, a region that is home to Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Muslim ethnic group.

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Reuters

A video grab from CCTV shows a burning vehicle in Urumqi, Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China July 6, 2009.
An official at the Urumqi Public Security Bureau said parts of the city remained locked down Monday morning. The official said 20 to 30 people had been injured or killed in the clashes.

Uighurs have long chafed at restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices imposed by a Chinese government fearful of political dissent in strategically important Xinjiang, which covers one-sixth of China's territory and is also an important oil-producing region.

Many Uighurs resent what they see as economic and social discrimination by China's majority Han Chinese, who have migrated to Xinjiang in growing numbers. And some—seeking independence from China—have waged sporadic and at-times violent campaigns against the government.

Uighur activists said hundreds of Uighurs, many of them students, had gathered Sunday to protest racial discrimination and call for government action against the perpetrators of an attack last month on Uighur migrant workers at a toy factory in southern China.

In that incident, a group of Han Chinese broke into a factory dormitory housing Uighur workers. Uighur groups say the death toll may have been higher. The Han Chinese were apparently angry that Uighur workers had jobs they felt should have gone to Han people.

Pictures said to be of the Sunday's protests distributed by the Washington-based Uyghur American Association, showed young Uighurs marching in Urumqi, in some cases carrying the Chinese flag. Pictures also showed phalanxes of police in riot gear and armored vehicles of the paramilitary People's Armed Police.

Demonstrators clashed with the police, witnesses said, and rioters smashed shops and attacked buses. "Most were young Uighurs. They were smashing everything on the street," said one Han Chinese man who works as a driver.

Another Han Chinese man, who owns a shop in the city's central bazaar, said he saw Uighurs "with big knives stabbing people" on the street. He said crowds of Hans and Uighurs were fleeing the violence. "They were targeting Han, mostly," he added. "We need to hide inside for a few more days."

The government blamed the unrest on a prominent exiled Uighur leader, Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uyghur Congress, an activist group.

Sunday's demonstration was "instigated and directed from abroad," according to a government statement cited by Xinhua.

Alim Seytoff, vice president of the Washington-based Uyghur American Association, dismissed the government's claim, saying, "Every time something happens, they blame Ms. Kadeer." He added: "It's really the Chinese government's heavy-handed policies that create such protests and unrest."

Unrest in Xinjiang mounted last year, as some Uighurs sought to emulate widespread antigovernment demonstrations in Tibetan areas.

There were several violent incidents around the time of last summer's Beijing Olympics, including an attack on a border-police unit that left 16 dead. Ten militants died after another attack with improvised explosives in a Xinjiang city on the first weekend of the Games.

—Ellen Zhu contributed to this article.
Write to Gordon Fairclough at gordon.fairclough@wsj.com

China state media says 129 killed in riots in west
6 hours ago

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese state media says that 129 people have been killed and more than 800 hurt in violence in the country's western Xinjiang region.

The official Xinhua News Agency did not immediately give any other details Monday on the number of deaths. It earlier reported that four people had been killed in violence after nearly 1,000 protesters from a Muslim ethnic group rioted Sunday in the region's capital Urumqi, overturning barricades, attacking bystanders and clashing with police.

The protesters were demanding an investigation into a fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese workers at a southern China factory last month that state media said left two people dead.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

BEIJING (AP) — Nearly 1,000 protesters from a Muslim ethnic group rioted in China's far west, overturning barricades, attacking bystanders and clashing with police in violence that killed at least four people, including a policeman, state media and witnesses said.

Protesters, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, set dozens of cars on fire and attacked buses in several hours of violence in the Xinjiang province city of Urumqi. The violence appeared to subside as the police and military presence intensified into the night, according to participants and witnesses.

Tensions between Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese are never far from the surface in Xinjiang, China's vast Central Asian buffer province, where militant Uighurs have waged sporadic, violent separatist campaign. The overwhelming majority of Urumqi's 2.3 million people are Han Chinese.

State television aired footage that appeared to show protesters attacking and kicking people on the ground. Other people sat dazed with blood pouring down their faces.

Mobile phone service provided by at least one company was cut Monday to stop people from organizing further action in Xinjiang.

The protest started Sunday with demonstrators demanding an investigation into a fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese workers at a southern China factory last month. Accounts differed over what happened next in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi, but the violence seemed to have started when a crowd of protesters — who started out peaceful — refused to disperse.

State media said at least 37 people — both Uighur and Han Chinese — were hospitalized with injuries.

Adam Grode, an American Fulbright scholar studying in Urumqi, said he heard explosions and also saw a few people being carried off on stretchers and a Han Chinese man with blood on his shirt entering a hospital.

He said he saw police pushing people back with tear gas, fire hoses and batons, and protesters knocking over police barriers and smashing bus windows.

"Every time the police showed some force, the people would jump the barriers and get back on the street. It was like a cat-and-mouse sort of game," said Grode, 26.

China Mobile phone service was suspended in the region "to help keep the peace and prevent the incident from spreading further," a customer service representative in Urumqi said.

Restoration of service will depend on how the situation develops," said the woman who would give only her surname, Yang.

Another provider, China Unicom, said there was no interruption of its service in Xinjiang.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported that "the situation was under control" by Monday morning and that police had shut down traffic in parts of the city as a precaution.

Xinhua said at least four people were killed in the violence, in which the crowd attacked passers-by, burned or vandalized 30 buses and cars and interrupted traffic on some roads.

The report said that 37 injured people had been treated at the Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital in Urumqi, and quoted a hospital official who spoke on condition of anonymity as saying those admitted were both Han and Uighur.

Xinjiang's government accused Uighur exiles led by a former businesswoman now living in America, Rebiya Kadeer, of fomenting the violence via the telephone and Internet.

Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri said in a televised address early Monday that "Rebiya had phone conversations with people in China on July 5 in order to incite and Web sites ... were used to orchestrate the incitement and spread propaganda."

A government statement quoted by Xinhua said the violence was "a pre-empted, organized violent crime. It is instigated and directed from abroad and carried out by outlaws in the country."

Kadeer's spokesman, Alim Seytoff, said by telephone from Washington, D.C., that the accusations were baseless.

"It's common practice for the Chinese government to accuse Ms. Kadeer for any unrest in East Turkestan and His Holiness the Dalai Lama for any unrest in Tibet," he said.

Uighur rights groups and militants demanding an independent Xinjiang often refer to the sprawling region of deserts and mountains, which borders eight Central Asian nations, as "East Turkestan."

The clashes Sunday in Urumqi echoed last year's unrest in Tibet, when a peaceful demonstration by monks in the capital of Lhasa erupted into riots that spread to surrounding areas, leaving at least 22 dead. The Chinese government accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating the violence — a charge he denied.

Seytoff also read a brief statement from Kadeer: "The real cause of the problem lies with the Chinese government's policies toward the Uighurs. It's not alleged instigation by me or some outside forces."

The demonstration started peacefully with more than 300 people staging a silent sit-down protest in People's Square in Urumqi to demand an investigation into the June 25 brawl at a toy factory in southern China, said Gulinisa Maimaiti, a 32-year-old employee of a foreign company who took part in the protest.

Xinhua said two died in last month's factory melee in southern Guangdong province, others say the real figure was higher.

Gulinisa said in a phone interview that the crowd grew to 1,000 people, and when they refused to disperse, police pinned protesters to the ground before taking 40 protesters away.

Uighur separatists have waged a sporadic campaign for independence in recent decades, and the military, armed police and riot squads maintain a visible presence in the region. After a few years of relative calm, separatist violence picked up last year with attacks against border police and bombings of government buildings.

Four Uighur detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were recently released and relocated to Bermuda despite Beijing's objections because U.S. officials have said they fear the men would be executed if they returned to China. Officials have also been trying to transfer 13 others to the Pacific nation of Palau.

youngblood wrote:I heard about this on the radio this morning. US is in a tough position with China. Do you back minorities such as Uighurs and Tibetans at the risk of losing diplomacy with a country as important as China.

dogma wrote:. They love American commodities, but they see their consumption of them as a way of striking at the pig-dog.

dogma wrote:China is like the blue screen of death. You hate it, and you do everything in your power to avoid it, but you know its coming and you can't ever stop it.

Not even the US can fight a war with a billion people. China is like the blue screen of death. You hate it, and you do everything in your power to avoid it, but you know its coming and you can't ever stop it.

dogma wrote:The problem is their asymmetric capability. Reliable sources describe their cyber-warfare capability as the best in the world, and their A-Sat setup is nothing to sneeze at either.

They can't necessarily get to us, but they can certainly make us come to them.

ShumaGorath wrote:

Theoretically we should be advancing out cyber security by leaps soon, Obama has made it a top priority for the first time in the governments history. Also, is it a really good idea for them to make us come to them when we have a considerable advantage in air and ocean. In a standup war we would just drop explodey things on them.

Though as I said before, neither country could survive a war. Both economies would collapse totally.