Asia

In my post on the recent shootings below, I posed a couple of big outstanding questions about what exactly has happened in Urumqi in the last week. After the jump I am posting an excellent AP story that has one of the most detailed accounts of the awful night of July 5th that I have seen and raises another major question. As the story …

An answer to some queries on the new design from our tech honchos in New York.

The RSS feed apparently is designed to only display a few lines and that won’t –and can’t because of the design of the reader itself– change. For the commenter who didn’t like clicking back and forth between posts, it seems the advantage of getting more …

Two Uighur men were shot dead by police yesterday in Urumqi. Unfortunately, as the South China Morning Post story reproduced here in full (it’s behind a paywall) after the jump lays out, the official account is at wide variance with what reporters and other witnesses saw. Having allowed reporters fairly open access to Urumqi in the …

The last link was somewhat belated and to yesterday’s piece. Here are today thoughts.

Here’s Austin latest dispatch from Urumqi.

As you’ll see, we have a new look which feels fresher and cleaner. Let us know what you think. Meanwhile, a reminder to commenters: no profanity please. I am perfectly happy to have lively debate and to be called all sorts of names, would be doing something wrong if it was all sweetness and light, but scatalogical abuse is just childish.

…to deal with the situation in Xinjiang. This is a pretty huge deal. For President Hu to leave Rome and hurry home is a significant loss of face for him in front of the assembled world leaders and that means that there must have been an extremely pressing reason for him to do so. And as a friend points out, that probably can only mean …

This is a very worrying development indeed. Story below from Xinhua, but Austin and other reporters have seen mobs of Chinese in the streets of Urumqi up to a thousand strong armed with staves and shovels, out for revenge. I’ve seen these sort of race riots before and at this point it is up to the security forces to lay down a …

Austin Ramzy, who is in Urumqi called to report that he is witnessing a new protest that is currently underway, apparently sparked by the presence of foreign reporters. He says that the Foreign Ministry and local government officials took six buses of reporters, about 50 in all, on a trip to see a burned out car dealership on Dawangnan …

As I wrote in a previous post, one of Beijing’ more interesting reactions to the Iran protests was to single out Twitter for its role in the protests. Now, not surprisingly, Twitter has been blocked since yesterday afternoon, presumably in reaction to the Urumqi riots Sunday and their bloody suppression. Nur Bekri, chairman of the …

Here’s our take on what must have been a primeval descent into chaos and blood in Urumqi last night. God knows what the final/real death count is going to be. As a number of the people I interviewed pointed out, the rapid admission of the appallingly high death toll is an astonishing break from usual conduct. Think of Tibet last March, …