July 17th, 2009
Shaoguan, China – When the local government in Xinjiang province dispatched more than 800 Uighur workers to a toy factory here in May, they couldn’t have predicted their fate would blow up into a national crisis. Today, police say two of the Uighur workers were killed and scores more injured in the June 26 events that ignited a firestorm of protest in restive Xinjiang. More mysteriously, some 700 of the original Uighur workers of Shaoguan’s massive electronic toy factory are being held out of sight behind locked gates roughly 10 miles away in an abandoned factory. Their plight, and the lack of quick police action on the initial murders, sparked mass protests and killings on July 5 in the Urumqi, adding the latest cracks in China’s façade of ethnic harmony.
http://www.feer.com/politics/2009/july58/Fear-Grips-Shaoguans-Uighurs
July 15th, 2009
SHAOGUAN, China — At the heart of a deadly June toy factory clash that sparked mass protests and killings 2,000 miles away in China’s far west lies a government policy that sends thousands of young Muslim Uighurs to fill labor gaps in the southeast.
Experts say despite yawning cultural differences and communication problems between Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese, there typically is little language training or other preparation for young Uighurs before they arrive in Guangdong province for factory jobs. Most come straight off the farm, far even from the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, and are dropped directly into an atmosphere that might as well be a different planet.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/uighur-labor-policy
July 13th, 2009
HUIZHOU, China — Blind luck sent hundreds of Muslim Uighurs to a factory here last year to make Nike shoes, instead of five hours north, where their friends and neighbors from the same rural patch of China’s far northwest went to make toys.
Though they aren’t there, the Shaoguan toy factory is heavy on the minds of Uighurs here, as they wait for news of loved ones and friends who have had little contact with the outside since the June 26 toy factory brawl and murder of Uighurs in their factory dorms — the incident that helped ignite mass protests and 184 deaths in Xinjiang province July 5.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090713/uighur-workers-guangdong
July 10th, 2009
SHAOGUAN, China — Three weeks after simmering racial tension escalated to mayhem and a double murder at a toy factory here, about 750 Uighur workers remain largely out of sight, behind locked gates and guarded doors — perhaps because they are at the center of a storm that has brought international attention to a remote Chinese province.
Most of the Xinjiang migrants who arrived at the massive factory in northern Guangdong province in May are apparently being held in a branch workshop 15 miles up the road, after the fight here led to mass protests and killings 2,000 miles away in their home province. Their tightly guarded new home and workshop is sealed off, and requests to visit inside and interview the Uighur men playing pool behind the gates after dark were refused by guards without explanation.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china/uighurs/xinjiang/guangdong-factory
