1989 Ürümqi unrest
| 1989 Ürümqi unrest | |
|---|---|
| Location | People's Square, Ürümqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China |
| Date | 19 May 1989 (UTC+8) |
| Injured | 150 |
The 1989 Ürümqi unrest, also known as the 19 May riots in Ürümqi (Chinese: 乌鲁木齐五·一九骚乱) took place in the city of Ürümqi, capital of East Turkistan (Xinjiang) in May 1989, which began with Muslim protesters marched and finally escalated into violent attack[1] against a Xinjiang Chinese Communist Party (CCP) office tower at People's Square on 19 May 1989. The protesters participating included Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic People.
The immediate cause was a book called Sexual Customs (性风俗) published in March 1989 which purported to describe the sexual life of Muslims and contained a number of controversial passages comparing Islamic architecture to various sexual features. This caused protests from Hui people in Gansu, Ningxia and Xinjiang. The protesters, mainly Uyghur and Hui, initially conducted an orderly march in the previous days and demanded that the government should destroy Sexual Customs and punish the two authors of the book (who used the pseudonyms "Ke Le" and "Sang Ya"), who were compared to Salman Rushdie in a reference to the controversy around The Satanic Verses.[2][3] However, the protest ended up rioting, where nearly 2,000 rioters overthrew cars, smashed windows and some attacked staff at CCP office. The government dispatched 1000 policemen and 1200 armed police soldiers to disperse the crowd and arrested 173.[4]
The protests were not limited to Ürümqi. Muslims all across China organized protests in 1989. 3000 Muslims from all ten Muslim ethnicities marched in Beijing on 12 May. In April 20,000 Muslims demonstrated in Lanzhou and up to 100,000 demonstrators came out in Xining. Smaller scale demonstrations took place in, Shanghai, Inner Mongolia, Wuhan, and Yunnan.[5][3] In response, the Chinese government banned the book, publicly burnt 95,000 copies of it in Lanzhou, and sentenced the authors to terms in jail.[6]
References[edit]
- ^ "A Recent History of Unrest in Xinjiang | Xinjiang: Far West China". 6 August 2009. Archived from the original on 2 March 2012. Retrieved 18 February 2012.
- ^ "乌鲁木齐穆斯林游行——5.19事件/尼扎穆丁∙侯赛因文/伊利夏提译". Boxun. Archived from the original on 8 March 2012. Retrieved 18 February 2012.
- ^ a b Del Vecchio, Mark S. (12 May 1989). "Chinese Moslems protest sexual practices book". UPI. Retrieved 25 September 2022.
- ^ 国家利益高于一切——新疆稳定问题观察与思考. 新疆人民出版社. 2002. p. 254. ISBN 7-22807710-5.
- ^ C. Gladney, Dru (1991). Muslim Chinese - Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic. Vol. 149. Harvard University Asia Center. p. 3. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1tg5gkz. ISBN 978-0-674-59497-5. JSTOR j.ctt1tg5gkz.
- ^ Harris, Rachel (July 2005). "Wang Luobin: Folk Song King of the Northwest or Song Thief?: Copyright, Representation, and Chinese Folk Songs". Modern China. 31 (3): 381–408. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.858.6728. doi:10.1177/0097700405276354. ISSN 0097-7004. S2CID 145245577.
