Xinjiang

More than 10,000 Han Chinese marched in the streets of Urumqi on Thursday in a new protest that belied the government's claim of having quashed ethnic unrest in the capital city of Xinjiang province. The protesters were enraged over hundreds of alleged attacks in which people were stabbed with hypodermic needles, attacks that they blamed on ethnic Uighurs. The northwestern-most region of China, Xinjiang has often witnessed violent confrontations between the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people concentrated there, and the Han Chinese who are perceived by the Uighur as colonizers.

Individuals make history. If the last leader of the Soviet Union had not been Mikhail Gorbachev, the world would be a different place. So the character and views ofChina's leader-designate, Xi Jinping, who is visiting the United States, do matter. After spending several years failing to answer the question "Who's Hu?" we must now ask "Who's Xi?" The best thumbnail summary that I have read comes in a forthcoming book by Jonathan Fenby called "Tiger Head, Snake Tails. " (The title refers to modern China, not Xi.)

A man drove an electric tricycle packed with explosives into a crowd in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang on Thursday. The blast, in a region that saw massive ethnic riots last summer, killed seven people and injured 14. Xinjiang government spokeswoman Hou Hanmin said a man was apprehended at the site of the explosion, which occurred outside the city of Aksu in the west-central part of the province, near China's border with Kyrgyzstan....

Under a bridge in the shadows of central Beijing, Aygul Tohti lays out the evening meal on a bare mattress that has served as bed and dining room table since police confiscated most of her possessions. There are thin slices of watermelon, a traditional flatbread called nan and what Tohti calls beef noodle soup, although there's no evidence of meat. Only cauliflower and broccoli simmer in an iron pot over an open wood fire. Her companions, two men also from the western city of Kashgar, open and close their cellphones to check the time.

A Chinese official says mosques in Urumqi have been ordered to stay closed, preventing traditional Friday prayers, after ethnic violence that left at least 156 dead. Another city in Xinjiang region has suspended visits by foreigners. The official said the mosques were ordered closed for public safety and that "people should stay at home today and pray." Separately, officials in Kashgar in southwestern Xinjiang have told visiting journalists that they and other foreigners had to leave.

At the Sunday market in Kashgar, it isn't a wild stretch to imagine commerce as it might have been in the 13th century when Marco Polo passed through this Silk Road oasis: Smooth-faced boys wrangle with horses, sheep and camels. Mounds of melons and grapes are stacked on the bare wooden planks of mule-drawn carts. A wizened man wearing a skullcap sharpens knives on a lathe operated by foot pedals. But modernity is catching up with a vengeance, as the Chinese government yanks the nation's westernmost city, despite the misgivings of many residents, into the 21st century.

Individuals make history. If the last leader of the Soviet Union had not been Mikhail Gorbachev, the world would be a different place. So the character and views ofChina's leader-designate, Xi Jinping, who is visiting the United States, do matter. After spending several years failing to answer the question "Who's Hu?" we must now ask "Who's Xi?" The best thumbnail summary that I have read comes in a forthcoming book by Jonathan Fenby called "Tiger Head, Snake Tails. " (The title refers to modern China, not Xi.)

China says it has accumulated evidence that the riots that swept through Urumqi on July 5, killing nearly 200 people, were part of a coordinated attack, possibly by a group with an Islamist agenda. Security officials were quoted Monday in the state-run press as saying that surveillance videos showed women in long Islamic robes and head coverings issuing orders to rioters. One woman was said to have given out clubs.

Conventional wisdom says China will not fragment; that it will not split into independent multiple governing groups, whether based on province-city, north-south, ethnic, military or other divisions; and that the party and military would not tolerate separatism. This thinking lulls U.S. and world policymakers away from considering whether fragmentation would be good for China, Asia and the world. Still, there are factors that point toward fragmentation.

Archeologists in northwest China have discovered 50 well-preserved corpses believed to be at least 3,000 years old, the official New China News Agency reported Monday. Officials of the Cultural Relics Bureau said the bodies have high noses, low cheekbones and blond or brown hair tied in a bun--different characteristics from the Mongoloid race, to which most Chinese belong. Five corpses are tattooed with geometric patterns.

At least four people were killed Monday when police and protesters clashed in China's restive Xinjiang region, the official New China News Agency said. Security forces in the western frontier city of Hotan opened fire on a crowd after people attacked a police station, set it on fire and took hostages, the report said. One police official, a security guard and two hostages were killed in the incident. Dilxat Raxit of the exile group World Uyghur Congress told Reuters news service that police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, which sparked the fighting.

At the Sunday market in Kashgar, it isn't a wild stretch to imagine commerce as it might have been in the 13th century when Marco Polo passed through this Silk Road oasis: Smooth-faced boys wrangle with horses, sheep and camels. Mounds of melons and grapes are stacked on the bare wooden planks of mule-drawn carts. A wizened man wearing a skullcap sharpens knives on a lathe operated by foot pedals. But modernity is catching up with a vengeance, as the Chinese government yanks the nation's westernmost city, despite the misgivings of many residents, into the 21st century.

When the platter of steaming, saucy chicken chunks is set on our table at Omar, a months-old Uighur restaurant in San Gabriel, it's clear we're in uncharted culinary territory. The sauce is dappled with tingle-inducing Sichuan peppercorns and chocolate brown star anise pods. Cardamom leaves poke out from a layer of sliced garlic cloves that blankets the meat. But the wide, flat handmade noodles soaking up those juicy flavors resemble a Moldavian grandmother's handiwork. You could say this hybrid creation is a metaphor for all Uighur cooking.

In California, melons are a highlight of the summer breakfast table. In Central Asia, they are a cultural obsession. And that has made for some interesting cross-pollination. In Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and China's Xinjiang region, hundreds of varieties ripen to perfection in the region's hot, dry summers, producing ultra-sweet, luscious fruits with unexpected flavors such as gardenia and vanilla. Melons overflow the bazaars and are piled by the roadsides. They are celebrated with special holidays; consumed for their medicinal properties; cooked, dried and even stored for the winter in special melon houses.

A man drove an electric tricycle packed with explosives into a crowd in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang on Thursday. The blast, in a region that saw massive ethnic riots last summer, killed seven people and injured 14. Xinjiang government spokeswoman Hou Hanmin said a man was apprehended at the site of the explosion, which occurred outside the city of Aksu in the west-central part of the province, near China's border with Kyrgyzstan....

With more than 50,000 closed-circuit cameras keeping an Orwellian eye on Urumqi's buses, markets and back alleys, along with thousands of paramilitary officers on patrol and a fresh infusion of economic aid, China managed to slide through the dreaded one-year anniversary of the worst ethnic violence in its recent history without incident. Urumqi, the northwestern city of 2.5 million in the Xinjiang region where 197 people were killed in riots in 2009, was quiet on Monday and "bathed in a golden sunlight," the official New China News Agency said.

Chinese officials announced Thursday that they had broken up a cell of Islamic separatists from the restive Xinjiang region who they said represented the "main terrorist threats" facing the country. At a news conference in Beijing, public security officials displayed photographs of knives, hatchets, bullets and homemade explosives said to have been confiscated between July and October from members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. East Turkestan is the name used by many ethnic Uighurs for Xinjiang, in northwestern China.

China has executed nine people for their participation in the country's worst ethnic rioting in decades, an official news service announced Monday in a terse bulletin. Although the report did not disclose the identity of those executed or even the date the sentence was carried out, it is presumed that most of those executed were Uighurs. Once the dominant ethnic group in northwestern China's Xinjiang region, Uighurs were blamed for the July 5 riots in Urumqi in which 197 people, mostly Han Chinese, were killed and 1,600 injured.