As it did in Tibet, the Chinese leadership is repressing the disturbances hardly in Xinjiang. The Muslims Uigures of the area are feeling degraded and stolen of their culture while they suffer in their birthplace under the domain of Han Chinese ethnicity.

Xinjiang (“new border”, in Chinese) is an enormous area that links China to Central Asia. Among about of 20 million inhabitants of Xinjiang, about 9 million are Uigures, an ethnic group whose majority is Muslim. They want to preserve their area and culture, but they seat that are dominated by the Han Chinese that treat them with contempt.

The central government in Beijing injects billion in Xinjiang every year, transporting the abundant petroleum and natural gas for their provinces of the East, that go by an economical boom.

As result, the economy in Xinjiang is growing more quickly than in many other Chinese provinces. In Urumqi, the focus of the disturbances, is a city in which sky-scrapers dominate the central area and the western influences are evident in the KFC restaurants, in the boutiques Max Mara and in the Adidas stores, but the romance of the East still exists beside the elements more contemporaries of Urumqi.

The Uigures can be seen selling melons and dry grapes in the markets and barbecue skewers in the corners. The Uigures and Han Chinese live and they work in relative harmony in Urumqi, in spite of the relationships among the two groups be not necessarily friendly.

The Communist’s leadership is trying to retake the control of the city for the simple force of the numbers. A convoy with a kilometer of extension of the Armed Popular Police enters in the city coming of the south, along the New Street China. The men are standing up in the trucks, with their shields and weapons prepared. Behind them follow cannons of water, armored vehicles of transport, command centers and ambulances.

Many still wonder why that could happen between the Uigures and the Han that, up to now, lived together as neighbors, co-workers, friends and students, however suddenly they began to attack each other with clubs, knives, swords and axes.

Via: Der Spiegel.