October 11:
Politburo Standing Committee members Li Changchun and Zhou Yongkang have praised the ethnic solidarity education campaign in Xinjiang that began in June 2010 to “promote development and stability.” The comments came at the opening ceremony of an exhibition featuring photos, graphics and a video series about the “Love the Great Motherland and Create a Better Home” campaign, which “features extensive efforts to communicate with local households on government policies for supporting Xinjiang’s development and stability.” Li said the campaign had achieved “long-term stability in Xinjiang” and Zhou called for “broader and deeper ethnic solidarity education.” Liu Yunshan, head of the CPC Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, said the campaign should be expanded to remote and rural areas and across various ethnic groups in Xinjiang, the official People’s Daily reports.
October 12:
On October 1, China’s National Day, a Uighur youth drove a motorcycle into a People’s Armed Police base in Kashi Yecheng County, Xinjiang and detonated an explosion killing up to 20 people including himself. Police have issued arrest warrants for two Uighur men around age 21 or 22 and set up checkpoints around the county searching every person and vehicle coming and leaving, Radio Free Asia reports. A local official said the incident was kept out of the media so as not to raise fears among the Han Chinese living in Yecheng, where 20 people were killed in a stabbing incident last February.
October 16:
Beijing has officially protested to Seoul over the death of a 44-year-old Chinese fisherman killed after a South Korean coast guard officer shot him with a rubber bullet after he pulled a knife during a raid. The coast guard was stopping Chinese boats from fishing illegally in the Yellow Sea, which is rich in crabs and anchovies. Every year the South Korean coastguard stops hundreds of Chinese vessels fishing in South Korea’s Exclusive Economic Zone, BBC reports. The fishermen are usually released after paying a fine but some attempts to intercept fishing boats have ended in violence. In April, a Chinese fisherman was sentenced to 30 years in jail for stabbing a South Korean coast guard officer to death last December. A week after the sentencing, four South Koreans were injured in a clash with Chinese sailors armed with clubs and knives.
October 17:
China’s Tianchi Industry and Trade has pulled out of a 50-year deal inked in 2005 for the extraction rights for North Korea’s Musan iron ore mine after North Korea Ferrous Metals Export and Import Corp. demanded a 20 percent price increase. Between the 1990s and 2008 Tianchi had extracted up to 1.5 million tons of iron ore per year from Musan for use by Tonghua Iron and Steel and other Chinese mills, but beginning in 2009 contract problems interrupted production, the Yonhap news agency reports. Tainchi’s cessation of production at Musan – Asia’s largest open-air iron mine with an estimated reserve of 3 billion tons – comes after it closed the smelter in Jilin that had processed the mine’s ore last month. Jilin provincial authorities are also displeased about the North’s lack of progress on a railway and a slurry pipeline between Nanping, Jilin and Musan. Last November Jilin completed a 41.7 km railway line to Nanping.
October 18:
Police have detained at least 20 people during a night of rioting in Luzhou, Sichuan sparked by rumors that traffic policemen had beaten a man to death. Over 1000 protesters overturned seven police cars and set fire to two of them, hurled stones, bricks and glass bottles at scores of riot police. Gan Junyuan, 58, died from a pre-existing medical condition, not because of a scuffle with police, the official China Daily reports. Officials said when two traffic policemen asked Gan to move his truck he refused and shouted at them. The policemen and Gan jostled before he became ill and died while receiving medical care. Rumors spread among the hundreds gathered at the scene that traffic policemen had beaten Gan to death. The South China Morning Post reports that Gan’s relatives disputed the official account.
[Editor’s Note: In June 2011 thousands of migrant workers attacked and set fire to police cars and the government headquarters in Zengcheng, Guangdong, after rumors circulated that the local city patrol had killed a pregnant migrant woman. The unrest continued even though news reports showed the woman was not harmed, suggesting that underling grievances were likely at play.]