In Xinjiang capital Urumqi, poverty greater threat than radical Islam

In the dirty backstreets of the Uygur old quarter of Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi in China’s far west, Abuduwahapu frowns when asked what he thinks is the root cause of the region’s festering problem with violence and unrest.

“The Han Chinese don’t have faith, and the Uygurs do. So they don’t really understand each other,” he said, referring to the Muslim religion the Turkic-speaking Uygur people follow, in contrast to the official atheism of the ruling Communist Party.

But for the teenage bread delivery boy, it’s not Islam that’s driving people to commit acts of violence, such as last week’s deadly car crash in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square - blamed by the government on Uygur Islamist extremists who want independence.

“Some people there support independence and some do not. Mostly, those who support it are unsatisfied because they are poor,” said Abuduwahapu, who came to Urumqi two years ago from the heavily Uygur old Silk Road city of Kashgar in Xinjiang’s southwest, near the Pakistani and Afghan border.

“The Han are afraid of Uygurs. They are afraid if we had guns, we would kill them,” he said, standing next to piles of smouldering garbage on plots of land where buildings have been demolished.