A Chinese miner will face a murder trial in the killing of a Mongolian man, the government said yesterday, as it mixed concessions with force to stop more ethnic protests in its resource-rich Inner Mongolia borderland.
Police mounted heavier patrols, disrupted the Internet and confined some students to school campuses in the regional capital of Hohhot and in several other cities where Mongols have joined recurring protests over the past week.
One witness said students tried to protest in Hohhot yesterday before being confronted and forced back by paramilitary police. The account could not be confirmed. A brief description of the protest was posted on an Internet chat site, but was quickly censored. Police and other officials reached by telephone declined to comment.
Ever more intense security has been ordered up over the past week in response to protests believed to be the largest to sweep Inner Mongolia in the past 20 years. The protests started after the deaths of two Mongolians in clashes with Chinese and quickly spiraled into calls for ethnic rights.
In signs of how politically sensitive the unrest is, Chinese official media have almost ignored the protests and an academic at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said he had been told not to talk about it. Searches for the terms “Hohhot” and “Inner Mongolia” on Sina Corp’s popular -Twitter-like Weibo service return the message: “According to relevant law and regulations, the search results are not shown.”
In one of the cases that triggered the protests, Xinhua news agency said yesterday that the -Xilinhot Intermediate People’s Court will hold a murder trial for Chinese miner Sun Shuning for driving a forklift and hitting Yan Wenlong. Yan had led a group of 20 people on May 15 to a coal mine that locals said caused noise, dust and pollution and when they began smashing mine property a clash ensued with miners, Xinhua said.
The quick handling of the case comes after Inner Mongolia’s Chinese Communist Party chief promised students in the city of Xilinhot that authorities would punish the perpetrators in that case and in one other — in which a Chinese truck driver hit and killed a Mongolian herder who with other herders was blocking coal trucks from intruding on their grazing lands.
Students have been at the forefront of many of the protests over the past week and are also taking the brunt of measures to quell the unrest. In many cities and some small towns, students are being kept on campus to avoid trouble.
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