‘Seven-Five’ unleashed official clampdown Uyghurs suffer 14 years later

Fourteen years ago, in the summer of 2009, false charges of rape pressed by Han Chinese workers against a few minority Uyghur colleagues led to the murder of Uyghurs at a southern China toy factory, triggering protests in the Uyghur homeland in northwestern China that soon grew deadly and set the stage for Beijing’s ensuing crackdown on Turkic Muslims.

The fallout from the June 25, 2009, murders of Uyghur workers at the Xuri Toy Factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province, was felt a few days later and 3,000 miles away in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. At first, students in Urumqi protested peacefully against Beijing’s failure to punish the killers in Shaoguan.

Tensions ran high. China’s government had counted two Uyghurs killed at the factory. A Guardian reporter at the scene thought the death toll was more like 30 Uyghurs dead. Exiled Uyghur academic and activist Abduweli Ayup, who hails from Konasheher, the same area of Xinjiang most of the Uyghur factory workers called home, told The China Project that research showed him that 36 Uyghurs were killed and 126 injured in Shaoguan.

On July 5, 2009, in Urumqi, a student protest for justice for the fallen workers turned violent, resulting in one of the bloodiest episodes in recent Chinese history. Officially, 197 died and 1,721 were injured. Most of the casualties were Han Chinese. Unofficial numbers from eyewitnesses and activists vary widely.

However grim July 5, “Seven-Five,” or qī wǔ 七五 (a Mandarin shorthand promoting an echo of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. in 2001), is the day the Turkic Muslim people of northwestern China believe set the scene for the genocidal mass internments to come.

The China Project spoke with three eyewitnesses to the carnage, each of whom remembers Seven-Five as if it were yesterday.

Gulnur

Gulnur left Xinjiang 20 years ago to study in the United Kingdom and didn’t look back. She had three children abroad and, eventually, missing home, was excited in the summer of 2009 finally to be taking her kids to her motherland to introduce them to family and friends.

They landed in Urumqi on July 5, 2009, on a perfect, blue-sky summer day. Flowers lined the road from the airport. All appeared well and she was glad to be home. A happy afternoon of gift giving, reunions, and family gossip quickly turned sour when her sister suddenly ordered her into a darkened back room where she was told to stay quiet. Breaking news on local state-run TV blamed foreigners for igniting violent riots and committing killings across the city. Her whole family was suddenly under suspicion.

“As far as they were concerned I was now a foreigner,” Gulnur told The China Project, using only her first name for fear of reprisals against family still in China. “It was too much of a coincidence that I had arrived on that exact day. I realized I was no longer welcome.”

“We had no idea what was going on, but were all suddenly afraid for our lives,” she said.

Reports of the day’s events are patchy, some underplayed and others exaggerated. An almost immediate official news blackout compounded the problem as outbreaks of violence erupted in every suburb. It has never been clearly established exactly how peaceful student protesters demanding an investigation into the killing of Uyghurs working in a toy factory 3,000 miles away became a murderous mob. Knives and Molotov cocktails appeared among the crowd and a swelling rabble rampaged through the city, burning and overturning buses and cars, smashing shop windows, and killing innocent bystanders.

In reaction, machine gun fire crackled through the night air. After the police cut off phone lines and the internet, the shooting stopped and a cousin who had taken refuge in Gulnur’s sister’s apartment tried to make a break for it to go home. She quickly returned saying she had seen trucks laden with dead bodies.

“She was screaming that we would all be next,” Gulnur said.

At around 1:30 a.m. a loudspeaker mounted atop a van passing the apartment wailed “Allahu Akbar!” “God is Great!” Uyghur protesters who had fled the violence in the streets and hid in apartments in the neighborhood were lured outside by the loudspeaker broadcasting what she imagined they thought was a Uyghur victory cry. Machine guns rang out again.

“It was a trap,” Gulnur said.

“The only noise we heard after this was the sound of power hoses spraying the ground, the buildings, and even the trees,” Gulnur said. “It went on through the night. They got rid of every sign there had been a massacre. By the morning, the bodies and the blood had disappeared.”

To this day, Gulnur disputes the official Seven-Five casualty figures. Her enduring memory of the violence is not of the events of the daylight hours, when she admits Uyghurs turned against Han Chinese — but of looking down from her sister’s 13th-floor apartment block window that night to see diggers scooping piles of dead Uyghur bodies onto trucks.

“I saw hundreds of bodies,” Gulnur said. “I sometimes still see them when I close my eyes.”

Three days later, Wang Lequan, the Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang, appeared on national television rebuking Uyghurs for the violence and urging Han Chinese to get even. And they did. Armed with ax handles, they, too, rampaged through Urumqi to get revenge, killing Uyghurs in their wake.

“My life changed forever after this,” Gulnur said.

Wang Lequan was succeeded by Chen Quanguo, who, beginning in 2016, launched policies that rounded up Uyghurs en masse, implemented 24/7 surveillance across Xinjiang, forced the sterilization of Uyghur women, and began the systematic erasure of the Uyghur culture and language.

Since Chen Quanguo’s policies were rolled out, Gulnur has not dared to contact or search for her sister.

“I have been broken completely by this and my health has been destroyed,” Gulnur said. “Nothing can describe the pain I feel.”

Aigul

Aigul, who changed her name and identity because of what she saw on Seven-Five, spoke to The China Project from her exiled home in Istanbul, asking that her personal details be kept secret for fear of reprisals from inside China. Even though Aigul is now a Turkish citizen, she still fears Beijing’s powerful reach and the threat of being forced to return to the open-air prison that her former home has become.

Aigul was a student who joined the angry mob in downtown Urumqi on July 5, 2009. Police fired tear gas at her and her fellow students. To escape the growing number of armored vehicles and soldiers with machine guns, Aigul ran as fast as she could to a friend’s house where she could take refuge overnight. On her way, Aigul saw Han police quarreling with the Uyghur officers who refused to fire on their own people, and Uyghur officers trading insults with Uyghur colleagues, telling them not to hurt their brothers.

Through the evening, the only sounds Aigul could hear were gunfire followed by the screams and shouts of students calling for help. She said she was too afraid to look out of the window during the shooting, but around 2 a.m. she dared to part a curtain and saw blood everywhere in the light of the street lamps. After the screaming had died down, she heard the sound of pressure hoses outside their apartment.

“By the morning, most of the blood had been washed away,” she said. “But there were still traces. I could see what had happened during the night.”

The next day, a stunned city woke to the reality of what had taken place, but few dared speak of what they had seen.

“We were all so scared, but gradually people started to mention relatives and friends who had disappeared,” Aigul said. “People were crying that their brothers, sons, and husbands had disappeared. There were so many stories like this.”

“A friend’s soldier husband reported guarding a prison full of young and old, their feet shackled with iron chains,” Aigul said. “One of my roommates disappeared after going outside to see what was going on. She never reappeared. For three months, I was beside myself with terror over everything I had seen,” said Aigul, describing the swirling rumor mill that filled the days and months after Seven-Five.

Aigul and her compatriots obsessed over the disappearances, the round-ups, imprisonments, and — they were now hearing — executions. She contemplated fleeing Xinjiang to join the Uyghur resistance movement overseas with the young man she subsequently married.

“We were so angry. We could see from the government’s reaction to the peaceful protest that Uyghurs had no future. We faced the fact after this that the Chinese government would never listen to us. We were even ready to die because there was nothing left to live for. Qi-Wu spelled the end for my people,” Aigul said.

Aziz

Aziz Isa Elkun is a Uyghur poet exiled in London. Elkun told The China Project that the Urumqi riot of July 5, 2009, marked a “turning point” for his people. The official violence unleashed on Uyghurs on Seven-Five caused them to “lose all hope that they could live under the CCP,” and signaled the beginning of open and active resistance to the regime.

Elkun and his family — he has two daughters with his wife, Rachel Harris, a Uyghur ethnomusicologist — happened to be in Urumqi on July 5, 2009, heading south for a family reunion with relatives, when they were trapped in their university lodgings as the fighting broke out in the streets surrounding the campus.

“A living witness of the 5th of July Massacre,” is how Elkun describes himself.

In a paper titled “Invitation to a Mourning Ceremony: Perspectives on the Uyghur Internet,” Elkun and co-author Harris detail the eight-month-long Xinjiang internet shutdown that ensued after Seven-Five. They describe the “explosions at 6 p.m.,” “the thick plumes of smoke rising from Da Bazar (the main Uyghur shopping area), the “gunshots and shouting,” and “fires burning all around the area.”

“After dark, we heard the chanting of demonstrators within the university campus,” Elkun told The China Project. “’Uyghurlar yashsun!’ [‘Long live the Uyghurs!’ or ‘Let the Uyghurs live!’]. Late into the night, we heard explosions, shouts and screams, and sustained automatic gunfire. The electricity and internet were cut off and phone networks were taken down around dusk.”

Elkun recorded the sounds they heard from the 22nd floor of their campus lodgings and was left in no doubt that there had been a massacre of the protesters by the Chinese police and army around midnight. He, too, remembers the eerie street washing and the hundreds of disappearances in the days that followed.

On the tenth anniversary of Seven-Five in 2019, Elkun recalled the family trip home to Xinjiang from London.

“We as a whole family witnessed this carnage. At that time, our youngest daughter was two years old and the eldest was five years old,” Elkun wrote. “Even though it’s been 10 years, our daughter will never forget the policemen pointing their guns at our heads, checking our passports and luggage.”

Today, 14 years after the massacre, Elkun defends his people’s right to self-determination and a right to demand justice over the killing of Shaoguan’s “innocent Uyghur factory workers.”

“Seven-Five was a moment of truth for the Uyghurs and also for the regime,” Elkun said. “Uyghurs realized how weak they were in the face of China, whose true nature was exposed during the killings.”

Despair over their bleak future and increasingly desperate resistance to assimilation led more and more Uyghurs down the road of strict Islamic observance and isolation from their Han Chinese countrymen, Elkun said.

“Enmity between Han and Uyghur culture grew even to the extent that many stopped drinking alcohol altogether and some refused to use China’s currency. They became more and more frustrated with the system and didn’t want anything to do with the Han at all,” Elkun said.

“There was no more ‘Uyghurs living happily with the Han Chinese,’” he said.

Interethnic hatred reached full pitch after 2009. Elkun can trace the genesis of China’s so-called Uyghur reeducation camps and the subsequent clampdowns and restrictive policies now accepted internationally as genocidal but denied strongly by Beijing. In fact, many things became clear during and after the riots, Elkun told The China Project.

“The Chinese government never wanted Uyghurs to improve and develop,” Elkun said. Countrywide poverty eradication schemes rolled out after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre never made it to the Uyghur region and, according to Elkun, by 2009, their economic and social systems were still lagging behind.

Mandatory Mandarin-Uyghur bilingual education for children was accelerated following Seven-Five, signaling the eventual end of Uyghur-language instruction for children in school. Beijing’s piggybacking onto the West’s so-called War on Terror after 9/11 gave China a license to rein in dissent, curb all religious and cultural observance, and subdue the Turkic nations as it saw fit.

“China was determined to get the world on board with its designation of the Uyghurs as terrorists,” Elkun said. “The government realized it could never change Uyghurs. So it set out to destroy them.”

Elkun, a well-known poet in his own right, has never composed a piece about the Urumqi riots. He has, however, translated an anonymous offering written following Seven-Five that sums up for him the feelings he had that night.

The Sound of Uyghurs Weeping

Hot like fire, and red like blood,

A city – furthest from the sea.

The sound of Uyghurs weeping,

Never ceases day or night.

Hands were fractured, heads were shattered,

Subjugated lives given over to suffering

Taste the poison they have swallowed,

Crying “my country” with their last breath.

I have settled far from my homeland,

Tears drench my pillow.

God was proud of us His creation,

But look, and see what we have become.