On the evening of 5 July 2009, several thousand Uyghurs gathered at Urumqi’s Grand Bazaar to demand an investigation into the deaths of two Uyghur factory workers killed days earlier in a brawl with Han Chinese colleagues at a toy factory in Guangdong province. The Guangdong clash followed a rumour, later dismissed by Chinese officials, that Uyghur men had raped two Han women. The Urumqi protest began peacefully. Within hours, it had turned violent, and by the following morning, Chinese state media reported 129 dead.
Riot, Reprisal, Repression
Xinhua’s final tally, issued on 18 July, put the death toll at 197, with 1,721 injured. Chinese authorities said 156 of the dead were civilians: 134 Han, 11 Hui, 10 Uyghur and one Manchu; twelve more were reported killed by security forces, with the rest unclassified. Hospitals reported that two-thirds of the injured were Han Chinese. The World Uyghur Congress disputes the official breakdown, saying the number of Uyghur dead was far higher and largely uncounted.
In the days after the riot, armed Han Chinese crowds staged retaliatory attacks on Uyghur residents, according to Radio Free Asia. Police, who had used tear gas and batons against the initial protest, made few arrests among the Han mobs. Urumqi Communist Party Secretary Li Zhi said those responsible for “cruel means” during the unrest would face execution.
Disappearances Documented
Human Rights Watch documented 43 cases of Uyghur men and teenage boys who disappeared after being detained by security forces in the weeks following the riot, and said the true number was likely far higher. On 12 October 2009, Chinese courts handed down the first sentences over the unrest: six Uyghur men were condemned to death and one to life imprisonment.
Reporters Without Borders condemned the blocking of more than 50 Uyghur-language websites and social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, cutting off communication across the region for months.
From Crackdown to Camps
Beginning in 2017, Chinese authorities built a network of what Sheffield Hallam University researchers have counted as more than 380 detention and internment facilities across Xinjiang. Researcher Adrian Zenz’s 2019 estimate — later cited by the United Nations — put the number who may have passed through that system at up to 1.5 million. The mass arrests, information blackouts and collective punishment documented after July 2009 preceded, by less than a decade, the mechanisms now used to run the camps: a period in which Beijing’s 2014 “Strike Hard” security campaign and the 2016 appointment of hardline official Chen Quanguo to lead Xinjiang set the stage for the mass camp-building that followed in 2017.
The US State Department determined in January 2021 that China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs, citing internment, forced sterilisation and forced labour among the underlying acts. The parliaments of the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and Lithuania have passed motions recognising the same designation. Legal analyses underpinning several of those findings, including the independent Uyghur Tribunal, have cited enforced disappearance — documented at scale in Xinjiang since 2014 and expanding sharply after 2017 — among the acts constituting crimes against humanity. China’s government has repeatedly denied that the camps constitute internment, describing them as vocational training centres and calling the genocide findings fabricated.
Contested to This Day
Beijing has never released a full account of how many Uyghurs died or disappeared in July 2009. Uyghur advocates have questioned the official casualty breakdown for fifteen years. China has not permitted an independent international investigation into the events of that week. UN human rights chief Navi Pillay called on Beijing in 2009 to treat detainees humanely; whether that call was heeded has never been independently verified.
Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, marked the fifteenth anniversary of the riot in 2024 by calling it a massacre and saying the genocide of the Uyghurs began that day — a claim his organisation continues to link to the ongoing situation in the region.