The reports of violence and deaths in the city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province in northwest China, draw renewed attention to this comparatively neglected region of China and of central Asia. The exact details of what happened there on the night of 5-6 July 2009 are unclear and (inevitably) disputed, though the background may include the assaults on Uighur migrant workers at a toy factory in Guangdong province on 26 June (in which two are reported dead and dozens injured).
Uighurs are a Turkic-Muslim ethnic group which has been living in East Turkestan for centuries. This region, reoccupied by the Qing dynasty in the mid-18th century, had become a Chinese province named Xinjiang in 1884; in 1955, after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in October 1949, was reorganised as the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region. The official statistics for 2007 suggest that Uighurs now number more than 10 million, and thus constitute Xinjiang's largest minority at almost 50% of its population - though this is a sharp reduction from 95% at the time of the communist takeover in 1949, the result of significant Chinese settlement in the region. The numbers of Uighurs and Han Chinese are now roughly equal.
Uighurs, claiming Xinjiang as their historical homeland, have repeatedly tried to gain independence and set up their own state - but just as repeatedly failed. Beijing, considering them a separatist and "splittist" group, has used a variety of means - cultural, social, economic, political and military - to crush any sign of restiveness among Uighurs (see James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang [C Hurst, 2007]).
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