There are about eight million Uighur people living in Xinjiang province in Western China. They are a Turkic people and they mostly follow Islam.
Once-powerful Uighurs Conquered by Chinese
At the height of their power (744-840 CE), the Uighur people controlled a large swath of land across Central Asia, from the Caspian Sea in the west to Manchuria in the east. An Asia Times article (January 23, 2002) reviewed some of the modern history of the region; “In 1757, the Manchus of the Q’ing Dynasty (1644-1911) invaded and consolidated the area into the dominion of the Chinese polity.”
However, the Uighurs never accepted Chinese domination and there were frequent rebellions. “Uighur nationalists declared independence in both 1933 and 1944,” wrote Sean L. Yom, “both secession attempts lasted several years before being ultimately suppressed.” The Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 brought Xinjiang province and its Uighur people under the control of Beijing.
Dilution of Uighur Majority
Chinese government policy has been geared towards encouraging Han Chinese migration into Xinjiang to reduce the domination of Uighurs.
On April 26, 2005, officials from Human Rights Watch gave testimony to the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus about the situation in Xinjiang: “Today, some 60 percent of Xinjiang’s population is of Central Asian origin - as against 94 percent in 1949; of those, eight out of nine are Turkic-speaking Uighurs.”
Starting in the early 1990s, Han Chinese people were given economic and land ownership incentives to move to the region. “Statistics indicate,” said Human Rights Watch, “that despite overall economic growth in the region, ethnic Chinese have tended to be the major beneficiaries.”
Uighur Separatist Movement Grows
Sean Yom wrote in The Asia Times that, “Since the early 1990s, Uighurs’ increasingly militant demands for independence have translated into a proliferation of separatist literature, numerous protests and riots, selected assassinations, and kidnappings of both Uighur and Han Communist Party officials…”
Beijing has responded with what Human Rights Watch characterizes as a “systematic and sustained attack, centrally controlled by the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party, on an ethno-nationalist group perceived as a threat to the stability and cohesiveness of the Chinese state.” This has involved a crackdown on religious expression.
Violence Escalates in Xinjiang
Tim Johnson reported for McClatchy Newspapers (August 4, 2008) on an attack carried out by Uighurs in the city of Kashgar. “…Two assailants in a truck mowed down a group of jogging policemen, then tossed grenades and slashed gasping survivors with knives in an attack that left 16 officers dead in this restive Muslim region in the nation’s far west.”
Eleven months later there has been an even worse outbreak of violence in the city of Urumqi
BBC News reports (July 6, 2009) that at least 140 people have been killed and 800 injured in a protest that turned deadly. There are very few foreign journalists in Xinjiang and those that are there are closely monitored by Chinese police so independent and accurate information is hard to come by. As the BBC story points out, “Beijing says Uighurs went on the rampage but one exiled Uighur leader says police fired on students.
“The protest was reportedly prompted by a deadly fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese in southern China last month.”
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