Ethnic violence in China continues

NY Times:

Rival protesters took to the streets again on Tuesday, defying Chinese government efforts to lock down this regional capital of 2.3 million people and other cities across its western desert region after bloody clashes between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese.

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Police fired tear gas on Tuesday at Han Chinese protesters armed with clubs, lead pipes, shovels and hoes, news reports said. Earlier, in an attempt to contain China’s worst ethnic violence in decades, the authorities imposed curfews, cut off cellphone and Internet services and sent armed police officers into neighborhoods.

The official Xinhua news agency said an overnight curfew would again be imposed here on Tuesday night.

Despite the authorities efforts to bring the situation under control, hundreds of Uighur protesters defied the police, crashing a state-run tour of the riot scene for foreign and Chinese journalists.

A wailing crowd of women, joined later by scores of Uighur men, marched down a wide avenue Tuesday with raised fists and tearfully demanded that the police release Uighur men who they said had been seized from their homes after Sunday’s violence. Some women waved the identification cards of men who had been detained.

As journalists watched, the demonstrators smashed the windshield of a police car and several police officers drew their pistols before the entire crowd was encircled by officers and paramilitary troops in riot gear.

“A lot of ordinary people were taken away by the police,” a protester named Qimanguli, a 13-year-old girl clad in a white T-shirt and a black headscarf, said, crying. She said her 19-year-old brother had been detained on Monday, long after the riots had ended.

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I suspect there is some religious intolerance mixed in with the ethnic hatred that has boiled over. The Chinese have shown a willingness to suppress such violence in teh past with state violence. In this case they are having to fight both sides. It is not so much an uprising againt teh state as an uprising of mutual hatred of the Han and the Uighur. I don't think they can make the hatred go away, but they may be able to make it more painful for both sides.