Ethnic Uighurs scuffled with armed police Tuesday in a fresh protest in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where at least 156 people have been killed and more than 1,400 people arrested in western China's worst ethnic violence in decades.
Most of the group of about 200 Uighurs were women protesting the arrests of their husbands in the massive crackdown on members of the Muslim minority by Chinese authorities since the violence was sparked Sunday in the Xinjiang provincial capital.
The incident played out in front of reporters who were being taken around Urumqi to see the aftermath of Sunday's riots, when hundreds of vehicles and shops were attacked.
The women, wearing ornate flowered headscarves, blocked a road. Some screamed that their husbands and children had been arrested. Riot police were at one end of the road and paramilitary police were at the other.
One woman said her husband was taken away and she would rather die than live without him.
As they marched down the street, paramilitary police in green camouflage fatigues with sticks marched toward them and pushed the crowd back. A woman fell. The brief scuffle ended when the police retreated. Police in black uniforms with assault rifles and tear gas guns took up positions on the other side of the crowd.
The women, however, stayed in the street, pumping their fists in the air and wailing. Meanwhile, police tried to weed the men out of the crowd, herding them down a side street. Two boys ran out of a side alley, and a policeman barked at them, "Go home" and grabbed one around the neck, pushing him.
The 90-minute protest ended when the women walked back into a market area without any resistance.
Police had also started trying to shepherd the journalists the away.
The new protest came after state media said Tuesday that police had arrested 1,434 suspects for their roles in Sunday's riot.
The violence does not bode well for China's efforts to mollify long-simmering ethnic tensions between the minority Uighur people, largely Muslim, and the ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang — a sprawling region three times the size of Texas that shares borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries.
Mobile phone service and the social networking site Twitter have been blocked, and Internet links also were cut or slowed down.
A non-violent protest by 200 people Monday was broken up in a second city, Kashgar, and the official Xinhua News Agency said police had evidence that demonstrators were trying to organize more unrest in Kashgar, Yili and Aksu.
It said police had raided several groups plotting unrest in Dawan township in Urumqi, as well as at a former race course that is home to a transient population.
The unrest in Urumqi began Sunday after 1,000 to 3,000 protesters gathered at the People's Square and protested the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers killed in a riot in southern China. Xinhua said two died; other sources put the figure higher. Internet and social networking reports on the incident had raised tensions in Xinjiang over the last two weeks.
Many Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) haven't been wooed by the rapid economic development. Some want independence, while others feel they're being marginalized in their homeland. The Han — China's ethnic majority — have been flooding into Xinjiang as the region becomes more developed.
The government often says the Uighurs should be grateful for the roads, railways, schools, hospitals and oil fields it has been building in Xinjiang, a region known for scorching deserts and snowy mountain ranges.
A similar situation exists in Tibet, where a violent protest last year left many Tibetan communities living under clamped-down security ever since.
There were no independent figures on the ethnic breakdown of the casualties. Xinhua quoted Li Yi, head of the publicity department of the Communist Party in Xinjiang, as saying Tuesday that 129 men and 27 women died. Li said 1,080 people were hurt in the rioting.
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