Riot in Urumqi

What I worried about in the last couple of days has come true. What happened in Guangdong wouldn't go away quitely, even if the government tried to do so. In order to reestablish legitimacy of sovereignty over all frontiers of China, Chinese government has adopted the progressive approach of interpreting history. In this linear scheme of history, the right to rule came from first liberation and second development. Accordingly, frontier regions were described as backward and barbaric, and the communist force was there to ensure positive social transformation. The unintended consequence of capitalist uneven development in China to ethnic relations is that minorities, usually lives in remote part of China, are more and more deemed by developed Han Chinese as uncivilized people. All underdeveloped regions have rumors of rampant negative social behavior and many uneducated people took such image to the heart and even essencialize individual cases to ethnic characters or religious common practice. Demonizing minorities thus became an uncontrolable developmental problem and was seen by the minorities, particularly those in exile, as a form of colonial repression. Economic grievance once coupled with ethnic conflict, itwould be very hard to decouple them. Under such circumstances, legal justice would be even harder to pursue.

One major problem from the source could be the toy factory's worker management method.

Apparently, in a capitalist system without close government supervision, workers tend to group according to their regional identities. If workers from Xinjiang are put together in order to avoid their interactions with workers form elsewhere, the real effect would be accumulating small frictions into large conflicts. Of course, language could be a problem, but mix up might be better than divide up. In a word, there're a lot of things need to be done to bring equal citizenship into reality. Until then, elites in exile could always use cases like this to mobilize massive riot against the government. On the other hand, such riot is no less common in the West. LA riot in 1992 and many other cases represented the same problem for multiethnic/multiracial societies. The best way to tackle it should be two-pronged. One is to have a visible affirmative action plans and activities so that social mobility in minority groups could be linked to the whole society. Second is to form a consensus across the ethnic lines that any social disruption would invariably lead to mutual destruction. Common people will not gain from the situation.

The development of internet gives the rise of ethnic conflict because language convenience makes local people search linkage not with the center of the state, but with the virtual community created on the internet and manipulated by exiles. Without proper channels of communication, these online closed communities will only breed extremism on both size. More laws and regulations also should be promulgated to curb the spread of lies and punish the ones who did that. Quicker government response and information transparency are required in the age of "politics of light". Hopefully, we will learn from this incident and will prevent future meaningless conflicts and loss of innocent lives.