COMMENT China’s bloodiest crackdown on protesters for 20 years reveals a government that is still more comfortable suppressing the symptoms of the country’s ethnic tensions than finding policies to solve the problems they cause.
According to official figures, at least 140 people were killed and almost a thousand wounded in street clashes between Muslim Uighurs and armed police in the city of Urumqi in the remote Xinjiang province. Uighurs, the region’s indigenous ethnic group, had taken to the streets to demand a fair investigation of the deaths of two Uighur workers in a fight against Han Chinese, China’s majority ethnicity.
