It has been a tense few days in Urumqi, the western Chinese city that saw renewed unrest last week, two months after rioting left nearly 200 dead. Late Friday the government said five people had been killed during the previous week’s unrest, including two “innocent civilians.” On Saturday it announced that Urumqi’s Communist Party Secretary Li Zhi and the Xinjiang regional police chief were dismissed. On Sunday Xinjiang party secretary Wang Lequan declared the government will send more than 7,000 officials to Urumqi neighborhoods to calm citizens angered by the recent syringe attacks. And to round out events, the state-run Xinhua news service reported today that people in Urumqi are playing badminton and practicing Latin dancing.
I have no doubt that some folks are enjoying themselves in Urumqi parks today, but I question whether the city has “returned to normal.” A few days after the July rioting most of Urumqi appeared as if nothing had happened. If you traveled through the north of the city, far from where tens of thousands of paramilitaries divided the Han neighborhoods from the main Uighur district in the south, nothing seemed unusual. But from talking with people, and seeing the readiness with which Urumqi’s Han residents gathered on the streets then and now, it’s clear things are clearly not right. With so many Han residents killed at the hands of Uighur rioters in July, there’s a sense of an unpaid blood debt. With mixed messages on the schedule for trials of riot suspects, and a series of new syringe attacks that Wang says were aimed at the city’s majority Han population, tension in the city will only continue. Perhaps that’s now considered normal in the Xinjiang capital.