URUMQI, China – The Chinese state news agency reported Monday that 156 people were killed and more than 800 injured when rioters clashed with the police in a regional capital in western China after days of rising tensions between members of the Uighur ethnic group and Han Chinese.
The casualty toll, if confirmed, would make this the deadliest outbreak of violence in China in many years.
The rioting broke out Sunday afternoon in a large market area of Urumqi, the capital of the vast, restive desert region of Xinjiang, and lasted for several hours before riot police officers and paramilitary or military troops locked down the Uighur quarter of the city
Here’s Foreign Policy Magazine’s take on the protests (China’s Latest Tibet)
