This is what we know for sure: on 5 July violence broke out in the northwestern Chinese city of Ürümqi, the provincial capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Cars and buses were set on fire. News reports showed footage of rioters beating and kicking people. We saw a four-year-old boy, his head bandaged, on a hospital trolley. He had been clinging to his pregnant mother's hand when she was shot. By the next morning thousands of riot officers and paramilitary police, armed with batons, bamboo poles and slingshots, patrolled the streets, where cars and shops still smouldered.

LRB 6 August 2009 | PDF Download