The 1989 Ürümqi unrest, also known as the 19 May riots in Ürümqi ( zh, s=乌鲁木齐五·一九骚乱) took place in the city of

Ürümqi Ürümqi, , is the capital of the Xinjiang, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwestern China. With a census population of 4 million in 2020, Ürümqi is the second-largest city in China's northwestern interior after Xi'an, also the ...

in May 1989, which began with

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

protesters marched and finally escalated into violent attack against a Xinjiang

Chinese Communist Party The Communist Party of China (CPC), also translated into English as Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Founded in 1921, the CCP emerged victorious in the ...

(CCP) office tower at

People's Square People's, branded as ''People's ViennaLine'' until May 2018, and legally ''Altenrhein Luftfahrt GmbH'', is an Austro- Swiss airline headquartered in Vienna, Austria. It operates scheduled and charter passenger flights mainly from its base at ...

on 19 May 1989. The protesters participating included Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic People. 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 are an East Asian ethnoreligious group predominantly composed of Islam in China, Chinese-speaking adherents of Islam. They are distributed throughout China, mainly in the Northwest China, northwestern provinces and in the Zhongy ...

Gansu Gansu is a provinces of China, province in Northwestern China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeastern part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibetan Plateau, Ti ...

, Ningxia and

Xinjiang Xinjiang,; , SASM/GNC romanization, SASM/GNC: Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Sinkiang, officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an Autonomous regions of China, autonomous region of the China, People' ...

. The protesters, mainly Uyghur and Hui, initially conducted an orderly march in the previous days and demanded that the government should 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 and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern wor ...

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 CCP 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 northwestern 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. His ...

and up to 100,000 demonstrators came out in Xining. Smaller scale demonstrations took place in, Shanghai, Inner Mongolia, Wuhan, and 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.

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