The international press is reporting on a weekend of violence in Xinjiang province of China. Tensions have been rising in recent days which led to what Xinhua new agency in China called " an eruption of violence" on Sunday afternoon according to the Financial Times reporter Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai today. Here two men killed a truck driver and hijacked the truck driving it into a crowd of bystanders after they had set off an explosive device. Initial reports indicate the two were Uighurs and the truck driver and bystanders Han Chinese. The BBC reports an entirely different event where 4 men attacked a restaurant and stabbed two people to death and then 4 others outside after which police killed them. The BBC report is derived from local news sources and one combines the events into one where two separate assailants escaped and then captured the truck (http://www.bbc.co.uk/...). Those involved in the attacks are identified in a Xinjiang news agency as Pakistani trained Muslim militants of the separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Speculation by some sources (http://www.eurasiareview.com/... ) argue that the attacks were aimed at undermining the Chinese Government economic event in September. What has been called the 1st China-Eurasia Expo in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang. This same source calls Xinjiang "government controlled" or "Chinese controlled" giving credence to separatist terror attacks.
On the 18th of July a serious incident occurred where the main event centered on an attack on a police station in Hotan where at least 20 people were killed and like the violence two years ago, this was led by Uighurs an ethnic Turkic speaking people. Media coverage of events in Xinjiang have been spotty and confusion has resulted by the way the media defines authors of violence and the purported goals of the riots in China's Xinjiang region. Emphasis was put in both 2009 on the fact of the 150 plus deaths and more than 2,000 injured but not on the fact that the victims were almost all Han Chinese. I have wondered why the media, especially the international media, has not used the term, "race riot" or some other means of describing the one-sided violence.
Most photographs in past incidents have been of Han Chinese with clubs out to get revenge or Uighur women crying over Uighur rioters who have been arrested. Chinese officials have been castigated for blaming outside influences, and sinister implications were made by the departure of Hu Jintao from the G8 meeting that year. One wonders why we saw thousands of images of the demonstrations on the streets of Tehran but hardly any from the scenes of the murders of Han Chinese at the hands of Uighur mobs.
Present conditions of tension and violence are attributed to the recent discovery of vast energy reserves in the area or the opening of the Karakoram Highway by the Chinese and the liberalization of movement of Uighurs along it as well as economic opportunities (see Ziad Haider, "Sino-Pakistan Relations and Xinjiang's Uighurs" Asian Survey, v. 45, n. 4, 2005:522-545). Most scholars agree that the Uighurs have benefited economically immensely since the opening of the highway, establishing trade relations with Pakistanis and Uighurs who had fled to Pakistan from the USSR in the 1930s. Pakistani traders have traveled routinely to Xinjiang and Kashgar especially bringing the movies and music of Bollywood, and Indian products as well as radical Islamic politics (see M. Ehsan Ahrari, "China, Pakistan and the 'Taliban Syndrome'" Asian Survey, v. 40, n. 4, 2000:658-671). Large numbers of Uighurs have traveled to Mecca in the Hajj.
The highway was built by the Chinese to allow them to aid Pakistan in case of an Indian-Pakistan war. Global politics in the region is influenced by the introduction of modern farming that has transformed less productive traditional methods of the Uighurs with modern methods and resulted in vastly increased production that has caused conflicts between local farmers and the government. The same is true for discoveries of oil and minerals and smuggling of contraband and drugs.
Emphasis of the Western press on the "plight" of the Uighurs shadows the global economic, religious and political issues and has tended to shape world opinion in reaction to claimed Chinese discrimination. It should be kept in mind that the Uighurs are not indigenous to Xinjiang but only recent arrivals as the chief agriculturalists (see T.C. Chang, Hsin-chiang Min-chu Pien-hsuan chi Hsien-chuang, Eng., as "The Evolution and Present Situation of Hsin-chiang's Ethnic Groups" Taipei: Central Literary Contributions Society, 1954." The Uighurs probably arrived in Xinjiang some time a 1,000 years ago driven out of their native Mongolia by the Khirgiz (Y.S. Ch'i, Hsi-yi Yao-lueh, Eng. as "An Outline History of the Northwestn Regions," Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936 and supported by Soviet archaeology, A.L. Mongait, Archaeology in the USSR 1955.) But the Kalmuks and others areas, including the Ili Valley were occupied by the Mongols, the Ili Valley being the ordu or encampment of Ogotai, Genghis Khan's son during the Yuan or Mongol dynasty 1206-1368. In fact, China has had control or been the main political and economic force in the area for at least 2,000 years. The Tarim Basin was the main area of Uighur occupation and they are a minority among minorities in Xinjiang (see Herold J. Wiens, "Change in the ethnography and land use of the Ili Valley and region, Chinese Turkestan," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, v. 59, n. 4, Dec. 1969:753-775).