The brawl between Han Chinese and Uighurs at a factory in southern China was scarcely covered by state media, but accounts and photos spread quickly via the Internet and became a spark that helped ignite deadly riots thousands of kilometers away in the Uighur homeland.
Even in tightly controlled China, relatively unfettered commentaries and images circulating on Web sites helped stir up tensions and rally people to join an initially peaceful protest in the Xinjiang region that spiraled into violence on Sunday, leaving more than 150 people dead.
In China, as in Iran and other hotspots, the Internet, social networking and micro-blogging are playing a central role in mobilizing people power — and becoming contested ground as governments fight back.
In the Internet age, events in “places like Xinjiang or Tibet, which were always considered very remote,” can suddenly become close and immediate for people around the world, said Xiao Qiang (蕭強), director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley.
Since the outburst in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, the Chinese government has blocked Twitter and Facebook, scrubbed news sites, unplugged the Internet entirely in some places and slowed it and cell phone service to a crawl in others to stifle reports about the violence — and get its own message out that authorities are in control.
Keyword filters have been activated on search engines like Baidu and Google’s Chinese version so that searches for “Xinjiang” or “Uighur” only turn up results that jibe with the official version of events.
That a fight in one part of China could generate a riot 10 days later thousands of kilometers away underscores how slippery fast-evolving communication technologies can be.
State media reports said only two people died in the June 25 fight between Uighur and Han Chinese workers at a toy factory in southern Shaoguan city. In the days that followed, however, graphic photos spread on the Internet purportedly showing at least a half-dozen bodies of Uighurs, with Han Chinese — members of China’s majority ethnic group — standing over them, arms raised in victory.
Expunged from some sites, the photos were posted and reposted, some on overseas servers beyond the reach of censors. Their impact was amplified by postings on bulletin boards and other sites.
Uighurbiz.cn, a site popular among Uighurs, carried an open letter over the weekend suggesting there would be revenge for the factory fight.
A flurry of postings on another popular site, Diyarim.com, began calling for action in Urumqi. Diyarim’s founder, Dilixati, remembers one: “Gather at 5 pm at People’s Square. Young people if you have time come to the square.”
The messages kept reappearing, and he called police to alert them and took the site off-line, said Dilixati, who would give only his first name for fear of reprisals.
Hours after Sunday’s riot, when police were still trying to pacify Urumqi’s streets, Xinjiang’s leaders went on TV to denounce Uighur separatists living abroad for using Diyarim and Uighurbiz to organize the disturbance.
That the riot occurred in Urumqi may be testament to its being the most-wired place in Xinjiang, a remote region of vast deserts and towering mountains.
Only a dozen years ago, when China was scarcely wired, details of the authorities’ brutal quelling of a similar protest by Uighurs in the city of Yining leaked out slowly and even today remain obscure.
Unplugging Internet and cell phone service has become standard practice for dealing with civil unrest. The government did so in March over worries about renewed anti-Chinese demonstrations in Tibetan areas.
Though officials usually prefer to keep silent about such tactics, Urumqi’s top Communist Party official, Li Zhi (栗智), told a news conference on Tuesday that the Internet was deliberately cut off in parts of the city. He said it was done “in order to quench the riot quickly and prevent violence from spreading to other places.”
Such censorship does not quiet unrest for long, but instead ends up giving rumors more credence than they deserve, Xiao said.
“The more you try to police the Internet, and delete information, the more those rumors become some kind of truth and people just pick what they want to believe,” Xiao said. “That’s the negative direct consequences of such tight information control.”
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was