URUMQI, China, (Reuters) – Five people died in unrest this week in the far-west Chinese city of Urumqi, its deputy mayor said yesterday, after a third day of protests which were broken up by police using tear gas.
Han Chinese protesters massed in the capital of the Xinjiang region, angry at authorities they blamed for failing to control a spate of syringe attacks and being slow to bring to trial ethnic Uighurs charged with deadly rioting on July 5.
The demonstrations are a rare direct challenge to the government by middle class urbanites, and could inflame ethnic resentments as Beijing prepares to showcase the nation’s achievements on Oct. 1, the 60th anniversary of Communist rule.
Troops blocked protesters’ access to neighbourhoods that are home to Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people native to the energy-rich region.
Faced with deteriorating support among the majority Han Chinese, Beijing dispatched public security minister Meng Jianzhu to Urumqi, where he urged officials to “restore social order as soon as possible”.
The unrest came two months after deadly ethnic riots swept the city, killing at least 197 people, most of them Han Chinese. The July 5 riots began after police stopped Uighurs demonstrating against the deaths of Uighur factory workers attacked by Han co-workers in southern China in late June.
Among the five who died on Thursday, two were “innocent civilians”, while police were still investigating the other deaths, Deputy Mayor Zhang Hong told a news conference. He did not specify the ethnic backgrounds of the dead nor how they died.