The 2009 Urumqi Riots and Mass Detention of Uyghurs: Background information when reading Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

The 2009 Urumqi Riots and Mass Detention of Uyghurs

This article relates to Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

As Tahir Hamut Izgil recounts in his memoir, Waiting to be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide, treatment of Uyghurs in China has changed dramatically in the last decade. In earlier years, ethnic-minority Uyghurs were no strangers to persecution by Han Chinese, as Izgil himself experienced with an arbitrary arrest and three-year prison sentence in the mid-1990s. Since 2015, however, mass arrests have sent an estimated one million Uyghurs to internment camps. Officially known as "vocational education centers," these camps hold people without due process or even formal charges. Human rights organizations and media outlets have reported torture and forced labor being inflicted upon detainees. How did the situation deteriorate so badly? The spark was a protest in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region that is Uyghurs' traditional homeland.

In late June 2009, a rumor spread in Shaoguan, in southeast China, that two Han women had been raped by Uyghur migrant workers at a toy factory. Although no evidence was found for the assault, Han workers at the factory attacked Uyghur employees, and two Uyghurs were killed.

Uyghurs in Xinjiang, upon hearing of this incident, were outraged and perceived the killings to be emblematic of their long-standing grievances with ethnic-majority Han Chinese. These included job discrimination, poor treatment because of their Muslim religion, and state-sponsored immigration of Han onto Uyghur lands. In response, they held a large protest in Urumqi on July 5, 2009. Initially a peaceful protest, the demonstration devolved into rioting, although it remains unclear who instigated the violence. Approximately 200 people were killed as Uyghur and Han mobs attacked each other and destroyed property in an escalating cycle of vengeance.

The Chinese authorities quickly cracked down by firing live ammunition and tear gas at crowds, raiding Uyghur businesses and carrying out mass arrests of Uyghurs, all of which ended the rioting. But the underlying tensions that caused it were not addressed. Increased repression by the government continued in the following years, as did violent terror attacks, such as the 2014 bombing of an Urumqi train station which killed three people and injured 79. The Turkestan Islamic Party, an Uyghur Islamic extremist group, claimed responsibility for the attack.

After the bombings, President Xi Jinping's regime hardened surveillance and detention of Uyghurs, eventually resulting in the "re-education camps" where large swaths of the Uyghur population have been held since 2015. As Izgil describes in his book, mass arrests first targeted Uyghurs who were outwardly religious, had been abroad, or had been critical of the regime, but by 2017 the arrests swept up anyone, regardless of their past.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report in 2022 stating that China's actions may constitute crimes against humanity, yet the situation in Xinjiang remains unchanged.

A man waves a Chinese flag while standing on the hood of a damaged car during the 2009 Urumqi riots.
Photo taken by David Vilder, July 7, 2009 (CC BY 2.0)

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to Waiting to Be Arrested at Night. It first ran in the August 23, 2023 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.