Violent ethnic clashes plague China

Growing divide after deadly riots

By Jehangir S. Pocha, Globe Correspondent  |  December 19, 2004

NAN REN, China -- The silence in this dusty brick-making town seems idyllic. But the quiet is really the calm after a storm -- one that residents fear will soon return.

Nearly two months after deadly riots pitted ethnic Hans against Hui Muslims, both communities around this village in central Henan Province and elsewhere continue to seethe. The clashes brought into sharp relief the deteriorating relations between China's Han majority and its 55 ethnic and religious minorities, which include Tibetans, Mongolians, Koreans, and several Muslim groups.

In a broader sense, the riots also reflected the bitterness, prejudice, and anger grinding away at China's steadily fraying social fabric.

''Everyone here's gone mad. People who used to live together now want to kill each other," said a local restaurant owner who would give his name only as Ma. ''I'm worried that when the police leave, the fighting will start again."

On Oct. 28, the village of about 1,500 Han and 500 Hui exploded into violence after an altercation of differing origins. Ma, a Hui, said the clashes broke out after a Hui man was mugged by Han locals. Han Chinese in the area say the man was beaten after he knocked down a Han girl with his vehicle and refused to pay compensation.

Fierce fighting between the two communities raged for hours, said residents who put the toll at more than a hundred dead -- including at least 15 police officers -- and more than 400 injured. Other reports have estimated a death toll as low as seven, and there was no way to confirm the actual figure.

Because of the proliferation of cellphones and computers even in rural China, word of the riot spread quickly in the region, threatening to draw thousands more into the frenzy.

In Ji Yuan, about 80 miles west of Nan Ren, ''thousands of Hui people were getting into trucks to go join the fight," said Yuan Peng, a Hui man in Ji Yuan. Rumors also spread about a planeload of Huis flying in from the northwest region of Ningxia, an officially designated Hui autonomous area, where about 2 million of China's 8.2 million Huis live.

Authorities moved quickly to quell the violence, even deploying paramilitary troops, residents said. Now, surveillance vans still patrol the area around Nan Ren, and a large blue sign assures locals that a police detachment is working to ease tensions.

That's the most public concession that anything is amiss here, as Chinese media have given scant coverage to the riots. Journalists who have tried to enter the area have been detained.

With the area isolated from the outside and the government seen to be sweeping things under the carpet, members of both the Han and Hui communities see a growing divide between the two groups that is hardening old perceptions and stereotypes.

''We're good Muslims, but the Han people don't understand us," said Yuan Zong Qing, a truck driver in Ji Yuan. ''Our children cannot learn the Koran in school, and it's hard for them to even observe Ramadan. Some [Han Chinese] offer us pork and intimidate us and pressure us to keep Chinese names." Yuan prefers to call himself by his Arab name, Mohammad Dawood.

In Zhong Mou, another Henan town where a Hui-Han riot was reported this summer, a Han carpenter named Wang Tong Bin said he's ''always hated" the Hui because they're ''arrogant, aggressive and clannish. They have this group mentality, so if one Han person offends a Hui person, a lot of Hui will collect to take revenge," he said.

The Nan Ren riots have taken Han-Hui relations in the town to a new low, said Wang Chao, a retired Han mill worker in the town.

''The city hasn't recovered yet," he said from the backseat of his car, the only place he would agree to speak. ''Just look around you. All the Hui restaurants are empty because people aren't supporting their businesses."

Such unrest is rooted in an increasing alienation among people who feel sidelined by the government's single-minded pursuit of economic growth and the resultant increase in inequality, autocracy, and corruption. The government has long tried to mollify its potentially restive minorities such as the Hui with job preferences and other affirmative action programs. But with unemployment rising, particularly in the rural central and western provinces, resentment about this is increasing among the Han.

Hui men, in turn, often complain that they and other Muslim minorities have few ''real jobs" and are limited to owning restaurants on a street of other minority-owned businesses. But there is no doubt the Hui now enjoy far more religious freedom than they did in the first decades of Communist rule, when the party repressed practice of all faiths.

''People now come in droves to pray five times a day, and we are even getting new converts," said Lu Da Zhe An, a cleric at the newly built Arabian-style mosque in Shui Yun, a Hui village not far from Nan Ren.

This relatively greater religious freedom is also heightening differences between Han and Hui, said Mai Bao Guang, a butcher in Shui Yun. He, like many Hui, has recently taken to wearing a beard and an Arabic-style white prayer hat. Such increased devoutness and the Huis' tendency to congregate in and around mosques have made them appear clannish to many Han Chinese, Mai said.

The Henan tension is simmering amid an increase in civil unrest across China. Nearly 60,000 protests and agitations -- over issues such as unpaid pensions and private property seized by the government -- were reported around the country last year more than five times the number of a decade ago, the government said. Given local governments' reticence in reporting such information, the real number could well be higher.

Alarmed, party elders have responded to the rising social tensions by directing officials to be more responsive and considerate in their governance. But Chinese and foreign political analysts in Beijing say that's not enough.

Since the government has only recently withdrawn from many spheres of public life, Chinese society has not learned how to manage competing social interests, the analysts say. Hence the grass-roots mechanisms that open societies rely on to sort out similar ethnic or social tensions must be given time and support to develop, said Chen Xin, a professor of sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

From the back of his car Wang, the retired mill worker, said his life seems to be spinning outside the government's, and his, control. ''I have a Hui friend, and we used to eat and go out together," he said. ''Now, I'm not sure if I can. I don't want things to change, but I can't help it if they do."