By DPA,
Beijing : China’s riot-hit city of Urumqi appeared calmer early Wednesday, witnesses and state media said, a day after authorities imposed an overnight curfew following more ethnic-related protests and the gathering of armed gangs.
“It’s pretty normal,” one foreign reporter said by telephone as he walked along a main road in the far western city midmorning.
Many ordinary people were walking on the streets and apparently going about their normal business in the city centre, the reporter said.
But there were still many columns of riot police patrolling the city, the capital of the Xinjiang region, and an “aggressive atmosphere” remained among its 2.3 million ethnic Uighur and Han Chinese residents, he said.
State broadcaster China Central Television reported that many businesses and major markets in Urumqi were open Wednesday.
In a front-page editorial Wednesday, the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, urged local residents to work for “ethnic unity” and “protect the people’s interests”.
The Communist Party and state-backed Muslim leaders in Xinjiang region appealed for calm in televised speeches late Tuesday.
Chinese President Hu Jintao also pulled out of the G8 summit that starts Wednesday in Italy and left for China because of the escalating ethnic conflict in Xinjiang, the Chinese foreign ministry said.
The government said clashes Sunday and Monday in Urumqi between Uighur protestors and riot police as well as attacks on civilians, left at least 156 people dead and 1,080 injured.
Wang Lequan, the regional secretary of the Communist Party, said a curfew from 9 p.m. Tuesday to 8 a.m. Wednesday was imposed to “avoid further chaos”.
“Ethnic confrontation should be definitely prohibited,” Wang said in a televised speech.
Paramilitary police had struggled to restore order as more Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group that accuses Beijing of discrimination, protested and thousands of Han, China’s majority ethnic community, staged a counter-march Tuesday.
The Han protestors reportedly pushed through police lines carrying sticks, metal poles, knives and other weapons, shouting slogans including, “Protect our home; protect our family members”.
The Munich-based World Uighur Congress said late Tuesday that groups of Han Chinese had attacked and killed some Uighurs, but the report could not immediately be confirmed.