Urumqi ethnic conflict and failure of the Chinese justice system
Author: Anthony Garnaut, Melbourne University
A video of lethal, apparently racially-motivated, bashings, which triggered an official investigation that uncovered no ‘racist’ motives, that in turn sparked off deadly rioting, arson and looting, which all ended with a downtown curfew imposed by a hefty police presence. It might sound like a page from LA’s recent history, but this was the sequence of events on Sunday in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang region, when a vicious riot grew out of what had been a peaceful demonstration that afternoon calling for a fresh investigation into the provocative video. In Urumqi we do not yet know how the police and armed forces restrained the mob, we do not know whether the sounds we hear on the video of the peaceful demonstration were in fact gunfire (because the Chinese media stated that the demonstrators were armed only with knives and clubs), and we do not know how many of the 156 people killed on Sunday were victims of either mob or state violence.