URUMQI, China, July 18 — As this shattered regional capital sorts through the corpses from China’s deadliest civil unrest in decades, another loss has become apparent: faith in the government’s ability to secure the peace and quell mass disturbances. In many neighborhoods, police officers remained absent for hours as the carnage unfolded, witnesses say.
The bloodletting here on July 5, in which ethnic Uighurs pummeled and stabbed ethnic Han to death, was just the latest episode in a nationwide upswing in large-scale street violence that had already prompted concerned officials in Beijing to look for new ways to defuse such outbursts. In all of the recent cases, not only were officials and security forces unable to contain the violence, but average people clashed with the police en masse — a sign of the profound distrust of local authority throughout much of China.
“In the last several years, the level of violence and speed with which these incidents can turn violent has increased,” said Murray Scot Tanner, an analyst of Chinese security. “It raises a very, very serious question: To what extent are the Chinese people afraid of their police anymore?”
In parts of the Uighur quarter and in poorer, mixed areas of south Urumqi, young Uighur men with sticks, knives and stones went on a bloody rampage for about five hours while police officers remained mostly absent, according to interviews with dozens of residents. In some areas where police officers arrived but were outnumbered by rioters, the officers stood around or fled, witnesses said.
“Where were the police while people were being killed?” said Cheng Wei, 41, a landscaper whose neighbors, poor fruit vendors from Henan Province, lost a son in the riots. “They were completely useless.”
Large street protests that turn violent, and that officials and security forces have been powerless to stop, have been on the rise in recent years, analysts say. The government usually avoids reporting the number of protests or riots in China, but an article in January in Outlook Weekly, a policy magazine published by Xinhua, the state news agency, said there were 90,000 such events in 2006, up from 60,000 in 2003.
The central government still can completely lock down areas when it anticipates protests, as it did across the Tibetan plateau in the spring or for the 20th anniversary of the student rallies at Tiananmen Square in June. But increasingly, security forces seem to have been caught unaware.
The rampage by Uighurs on July 5 was followed for days by reprisal killings by Han vigilantes who defied police orders to refrain from violence. At least 192 people were killed and 1,721 injured in all of the violence, most of them Han, according to the government. Many Uighurs say the Uighur casualties have been severely undercounted. The Han, who dominate China, are the majority in Urumqi, even though the Uighurs, a Turkic people largely resentful of Chinese rule, are the biggest ethnic group in this western region of Xinjiang.
In March 2008, rioters in Tibet openly defied police officers who, caught by surprise, largely disappeared during the first 24 hours of violence. At least 19 people died.
Last month, tens of thousands of residents of Shishou, in Hubei Province, clashed with riot police officers over the mysterious death of a hotel chef. A year earlier, in Weng’an County of Guizhou Province, at least 30,000 people rioted over the handling of an inquiry into the death of a 17-year-old girl, torching police cars, the main police station and the government headquarters.
Frustration at legal injustice and Communist Party corruption is a common thread. The violence in Xinjiang began as a peaceful protest on July 5, when Uighurs called for a proper inquiry into a factory brawl in southern China that had left two Uighurs dead.
“The absence of an independent legal system is the party’s biggest mistake, because when people can’t take their grievances to the courts, they take them to the streets,” said Nicholas Bequelin, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.
So concerned are Chinese leaders over the rise in mass violence and the growing contempt for law enforcement that they have taken new measures to ensure stability, with the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic coming up in October.
Vice President Xi Jinping, pegged as the next leader of China, took charge of a committee to ensure social stability. Separately, party officials and police officers down to the county level have taken part in training for managing civil unrest. The drills include teaching them to disable local Internet service during an outbreak and emphasizing that leaders take part in dialogue at the front lines rather than resort to shows of force.
But party leaders and police officers in Urumqi failed to avert disaster the night of July 5 even though government officials say the police knew as early as 1 a.m. that day that Uighurs were planning to hold a protest.
In the early evening of July 5, galvanized by Internet messages, Uighurs began gathering at People’s Square in the city center, near the headquarters of the regional Communist Party and government offices, to protest the handling of the earlier factory brawl. Police officers quickly encircled the crowd, witnesses said.
A mile south, about 6 p.m., people also began gathering on the northern edge of the old Uighur quarter, said Adam Grode, an American teacher who watched the scene from his 16th-floor apartment. The crowd swelled to more than 1,000 people, including women and the elderly.
There were at first only a few traffic police officers standing around. But by 6:30 p.m., a line of troops from the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force, had formed to the north and was trying to push the crowd down into the Uighur quarter. Some officers charged with batons. The crowd surged back against the troops, fists raised.
Another wave of troops arrived. They were better equipped, with body padding and riot shields, Mr. Grode said. Some had rifles slung across their bodies.
Young men began hurling stones and bricks as the police attacked with batons. People also threw rocks at buses that had been halted. A full-fledged street battle erupted, though the police officers at this point did not use their guns, Mr. Grode said.
Just a few hundred yards south, at the busy Grand Bazaar area, there were few officers. The handful there just stood by as rioters set upon any Han civilians they saw, witnesses said. One taxi driver, who gave his name as Mr. Han, said he was dragged from his car by Uighurs with knives while policemen watched. He managed to escape.
After 8 p.m., rioters showed up in mixed neighborhoods about two miles southeast of the Uighur quarter. Police officers did not arrive until after 1 a.m., witnesses said. These areas were among the worst hit; witnesses said bodies were strewn all around Dawan North Road, for instance.
“The police arrived around 1:30 a.m., and they put down their riot shields to move bodies,” said Mr. Cheng, the landscaper.
Earlier, at twilight, back in the northern half of the Uighur quarter, officers sprinted through alleyways to beat down and handcuff Uighur men. By around 10 p.m., they had begun opening fire with guns and tear gas rifles, Mr. Grode said, adding that he heard occasional series of single-shot gunfire. Another foreigner also said she heard gunfire after dark.
By 1 a.m., the rioting had ebbed, and police officers in the Uighur quarter were putting scores of handcuffed men onto buses.
Han residents keep asking why security forces showed up so late in the southern neighborhoods, where Han live close to Uighurs and are clearly vulnerable. Mr. Tanner, the security analyst, said that 11 years after the Tiananmen Square protests, security forces were ordered to handle protests cautiously, but that if rioting broke out, officers and paramilitary troops could use “decisive force” as long as senior local officials had given approval. They are not supposed to let a riot run its course, he said.
But security forces also make securing government buildings, financial centers and other strategic points a top priority, Mr. Tanner said. Indeed, a local reporter wrote that he saw many police officers after 8 p.m. on Zhongshan Road, where government buildings are. This could help explain why officers did not show up in the residential areas until much later.
At the most basic level, though, the policing failure appears rooted in the government’s inability to understand the Uighur-Han relationship. “There’s a severe failure of intelligence about society and about social tensions,” Mr. Tanner said. “In this case, what I think they were clearly unprepared for is the level of organized intercommunal violence.”
Two days after the killings by the Uighurs, thousands of Han with sticks and knives clashed with police officers as the Han tried storming the Uighur quarter. None of them trusted the government to mete out proper punishment or to protect the Han.
A man who gave his name as Mr. Li, waving a wooden chair leg, said, “I’m here to safeguard justice.”
Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing. Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research from Urumqi.
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