Unrest in China No pastoral idyll

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http://www.economist.com/node/18775303

“THIS is a time when social contradictions are becoming conspicuous in our country,” China’s ruling Politburo concluded at a meeting on May 30th. As they were gathering, security forces in Inner Mongolia, north of the capital, were clamping down on the province’s biggest outbreak of ethnic unrest in decades. Elsewhere, messages of sympathy were pouring in from Chinese internet users for a man who had bombed government targets in the south of the country, killing himself and two others. Rightly, the Politburo noted that the task of “social management” in China was getting harder.

Inner Mongolia had long been regarded as among the tamest of China’s ethnic-minority regions. Even after the eruption of widespread protests and riots on the Tibetan plateau in 2008, and bloody inter-ethnic clashes in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, the following year, Inner Mongolia remained calm. More ethnic Mongols live in the Chinese province than over the border in independent Mongolia. Even so they form less than a fifth of Inner Mongolia’s 24m people, outnumbered by Han Chinese. Unlike Tibetans or Uighurs in Xinjiang, many Mongols have little if any mastery of their ancestral language.

Chinese leaders must therefore have been shocked when protests broke out in a handful of Inner Mongolian towns over the course of several days in late May. Not since the Tibetan unrest had ethnic disturbances spread so quickly. They were sparked by the apparent hit-and-run killing on May 10th of a Mongol herder by a Han Chinese lorry driver. The Mongol was among a group of herders who had been trying to stop lorries cutting across their grasslands to reach a coal mine. Four days later another Mongol was killed in a similar confrontation elsewhere.