Beijing Starts Razing Muslim Area

City officials began demolishing a popular Muslim enclave here Monday, aggravating already tense relations with ethnic minorities in their effort to spruce up the capital for celebrations marking half a century of Communist rule.

The demolition of “Xinjiang village” also is part of a wider effort to expel more than a third of the city’s 3 million-plus migrant workers within the next few years and to raze their ad hoc neighborhoods.

Xinjiang village is known for its population of ethnic Uighurs from China’s northwestern Xinjiang province. Its popular restaurants have long been in the way of planners who want to widen roads.

At night, the area has attracted droves of foreign students and tourists with its festive atmosphere. Smoke from shish kebabs envelops street-side diners feasting on homemade pasta, flat-baked breads and beer. Hawkers peddle Xinjiang’s famous melons, raisins and, only somewhat more furtively, hashish and heroin.

Until this week, officials had spared the district for fear of sparking conflict between Beijing’s majority Han Chinese and the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, many of whose brethren in Xinjiang province want independence.

But Monday, scores of police and officials diverted traffic and chased off foreign journalists as bulldozers and wrecking crews plowed into restaurants along an east-west thoroughfare near the University of Beijing on the city’s west side.

Hundreds of people will probably have to find new places to live.

Owners of the more than 30 restaurants being torn down scrambled to salvage their belongings, attracting a crowd of about 200 Han and Uighur onlookers.

“The officials’ attitude is to demolish first and discuss compensation later,” said one restaurant owner.

Earlier, about three dozen restaurateurs drafted a petition to the Beijing Minority Affairs Committee asking that demolition be postponed, or that they be compensated for their losses. The Uighurs said they have created hundreds of jobs, many for ethnic Han migrants.

They have also invested about $400,000 to improve their restaurants’ appearances. In recent years, concrete sheds with corrugated tin roofs have given way to Arabic-style minarets, plastic grape vines and wall tapestries depicting the Turkish seaport Istanbul.

Successful restaurateurs used their earnings to fly to Mecca for the annual Muslim pilgrimage, known as the hajj.

“We may not be Beijingers, but we are Chinese and we have rights,” a Uighur restaurateur named Aji said.

“The truth is that they just don’t want a Xinjiang village in Beijing,” she said.

While migrants to the capital toil at the dirty and menial jobs Beijing natives disdain, they are also blamed by residents for overburdened city services, as well as for rising crime and unemployment.

Many officials and residents feel that the government has lost control of the migrant communities, allowing them to become squalid ghettos riddled with drugs and crime.

Three years ago, Beijing officials bulldozed a teeming community of garment-trading migrants from Zhejiang province and sent its residents home or to other districts.

Other areas of Beijing are also under renovation before Oct. 1, the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Billboards are being removed and paving replaced around Tiananmen Square, where newspaper reports have said a military parade and fireworks will mark the anniversary.