The 1989 Ürümqi unrest, also known as the 19 May riots in Ürümqi () took place in the city of

Ürümqi Ürümqi ( ; also spelled Ürümchi or without umlauts), formerly known as Dihua (also spelled Tihwa), is the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the far northwest of the People's Republic of China. Ürümqi developed its ...

, capital of

Xinjiang Xinjiang, SASM/GNC: ''Xinjang''; zh, c=, p=Xīnjiāng; formerly romanized as Sinkiang (, ), officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China (PRC), located in the northwest ...

in China in May 1989, which began with

Muslim Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...

protesters marched and finally escalated into violent attack against Xinjiang CPC office tower at

People's Square People's Square is a large public square in the Huangpu District, Shanghai, Huangpu District of Shanghai. It is south of Nanjing Road (West) and north of Huaihai Road (East). People's Square is the site of Shanghai's municipal government head ...

on 19 May 1989. The immediate cause was a book called ''Sexual Customs'' () published in March 1989 which purported to describe the sexual life of Muslims and contained a number of controversial passages comparing Islamic architecture to various sexual features. This caused protests from

Hui people The Hui people ( zh, c=, p=Huízú, w=Hui2-tsu2, Xiao'erjing: , dng, Хуэйзў, ) are an East Asian ethnoreligious group predominantly composed of Chinese-speaking adherents of Islam. They are distributed throughout China, mainly in the ...

Gansu Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibet ...

, Ningxia and

. The protesters, mainly Uyghur and Hui, initially an conducted orderly march in the previous days and demanded for the government to destroy ''Sexual Customs'' and punish the two authors of the book (who used the pseudonyms "Ke Le" and "Sang Ya"), who were compared to

Salman Rushdie Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (; born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Wes ...

in a reference to the controversy around ''The Satanic Verses''. However, the protest ended up rioting, where nearly 2,000 rioters overthrew cars, smashed windows and some attacked staff at CPC office. The government dispatched 1000 policemen and 1200 armed police soldiers to disperse the crowd and arrested 173. The protests were not limited to Ürümqi. Muslims all across China organized protests in 1989. 3000 Muslims from all ten Muslim ethnicities marched in Beijing on 12 May. In April 20,000 Muslims demonstrated in

Lanzhou Lanzhou (, ; ) is the capital and largest city of Gansu Province in Northwest China. Located on the banks of the Yellow River, it is a key regional transportation hub, connecting areas further west by rail to the eastern half of the country. H ...

& up to a 100,000 demonstrators came out in

Xining Xining (; ), alternatively known as Sining, is the capital of Qinghai province in western China and the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau. The city was a commercial hub along the Northern Silk Road's Hexi Corridor for over 2000 years, and wa ...

. Smaller scale demonstrations took place in, Shanghai, Inner Mongolia, Wuhan, & Yunnan. In response, the Chinese government banned the book, publicly burnt 95,000 copies of it in Lanzhou, and sentenced the authors to terms in jail.

References

See also