The emergency meeting of China's nine-member Politburo Standing Committee was chaired by President Hu Jintao, who cut short his visit to Italy for the G8 summit because of the seriousness of the situation.

Violence erupted Sunday in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, as Uighurs protested the treatment of Uighur migrant workers at a toy factory in Guangdong province in the south of China. Two people were killed and many injured in attacks by Han Chinese workers. The protesters believed the authorities had done little to bring the attackers to justice.

The violence left 156 dead and more than 1,000 injured. Officials have yet to release a breakdown of the deaths between Uighurs, Han Chinese and security forces. An official at Urumqi's largest hospital said that of 291 injured people treated, 233 were Han, 39 Uighur and 19 from other ethnic groups. The Uighurs are a Turkic people. Ten million of them live in Xinjiang, a region covering one-sixth of China's total area. They form 46 percent of Xinjiang's population and are predominantly Muslim.

After further violence Tuesday, as Han mobs counter-rioted, attacking Uighur businesses, a massive influx of security forces established a tense calm. Government sources said that 20,000 paramilitary police had been sent to the city, where their presence was highly visible Wednesday, backed by armored vehicles and military helicopters.

The Politburo meeting said the conflict had been organized by forces of terrorism, separatism and extremism at home and abroad, according to the state-run news agency, Xinhua. "Cadres and the public should stick to the principle that stability overrides everything," their statement said.

Xinhua also quoted government sources claiming they had evidence from mobile phone and Internet traffic linking Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uighur Association, to the riots. Kadeer, who currently resides in the United States after spending five years in prison in China, denied any role in the violence while condemning China's treatment of the Uighurs.

"We also condemn, in no uncertain terms, the violent actions of a number of Uyghur demonstrators that have been reported. We absolutely oppose violence in any form," she said in a recent statement.

A number of Uighur exile groups are opposed to China's treatment of the Uighur minority. Some of them have supported violent means. One, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, has been classified as a terrorist group by both the United States and China.

China's leadership has an obsessive concern with stability. Riots, whether ethnic or economic in origin, are to be isolated and suppressed as rapidly as possible. They represent a threat to China's economic development and, of course, the authority of the Chinese Communist Party. Yet they are on the rise. Between 1994 and 2005 "mass incidents," as they are labeled, grew from 10,000 to 87,000, according to the Ministry of Public Security. Many of these were rural riots sparked by economic hardship and corruption among local party leaders. The first priority for local party officials in the event of a riot is to prevent its spread into neighboring areas.

Where conflict is ethnic in origin, the government response is often to blame outside agitators while insisting that relations between the different groups are harmonious. Nur Bekri, the Xinjiang Region chairman, responded to the riots by saying on local TV that ethnic relations were "as solid as a rock."

Most Uighurs, and many Han, do not see it that way. Official denial of the problem may only be storing up more trouble for the future. Beijing has sought to alleviate the tensions by directing economic aid to the region, but many Uighurs see this benefitting the growing Han population. Living standards have risen, but so has unemployment among Uighurs and income disparity between Han and Uighur.

In 1949 the Han made up only 6 percent of Xinjiang's population. Today that figure is 40 percent as a result of consistent policies by the Communist Party to encourage Han migration to the region.

Uighurs believe that their freedom of religion is tightly controlled and that their culture is being eroded. Government policy is reducing the use of the Uighur language in education. In the 1990s Uighur was phased out as a language of instruction in higher education. In 2006 Chinese became the main language for preschool instruction.

related report
Xinjiang riot explodes myth of 'harmonious society': analysts
In a few brief hours of ethnic carnage on a summer's evening in China's restive Xinjiang region, the political elite's pet concept of "harmonious society" was shattered, according to analysts.

Hu Jintao, chief of the ruling Communist Party, first launched the concept in 2004 as a rallying cry that could motivate every citizen of the people's republic to help build a peaceful and prosperous society.

It was meant as a formula that could unite the giant nation of 1.3 billion, narrowing the divides among the 56 ethnic groups and bridging the yawning gaps between rich and poor, city and countryside, east coast and interior.

"He has largely failed at this level. It's an ideal that appears more distant today," said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a China expert at Hong Kong's Baptist University, following unrest in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi.

"We will have to see if this slogan is still invoked in the same manner in future. As things are now, it is triggering sarcasm... (The riots) show that China remains a violent country, with serious tensions in society," he said.

The unrest on Sunday afternoon in Urumqi saw thousands of Muslim Uighurs take to the streets in protest over an ethnically charged brawl late last month at a factory in southern China that left two Uighurs dead.

However Uighurs say the deeper reasons behind the protests were frustration and anger at decades of repressive rule under the Chinese government, whose leaders are mainly from the dominant Han ethnic group.

In a few hours of mayhem, the protests turned violent with Uighurs attacking Han, and security forces cracking down. Han Chinese have also since sought revenge with mobs roaming the streets of Urumqi armed with makeshift weapons.

The government said 156 people died in Sunday's unrest and most of those people were victims of the rioters, but exiled Uighur leaders say up to 800 may have been killed and security forces were responsible for many deaths.

President Hu was forced Wednesday to abruptly cut short a visit to Italy, missing out on a meeting of the Group of Eight rich nations, to deal with some of the worst ethnic strife in decades, in an unprecedented move.

Hu was expected to give a signal reassuring the government remained committed to the concept of a "harmonious society."

But for many, the harmony that the leaders and the media they control constantly talk about is no more than a fiction.

Besides tragic events such as those in Xinjiang, China every month records many thousands of "mass incidents," defined as crowds of more than 1,000 people assembled over issues such as land disputes or corruption.

And the Xinjiang violence has echoed highly publicised unrest in Buddhist Tibet last year.

"The harmonious society is not something real. It's merely an ideal, or an objective," said Hu Xingdou, an influential commentator and economist at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

"The fact that the government has come up with this objective shows that in reality, there's quite a deal of disharmony."

Jean-Louis Rocca, a sociologist at Beijing's Tsinghua University, agreed.

"The authorities have always said they were facing conflicts and problems that needed to be regulated... and that you have to work hard to achieve it," he said.

"There is no harmony (among the Han Chinese and China's other ethnic groups). Everyone knows it, and therefore things proceed with great difficulty."

In cyberspace the slogan of harmonious society is greeted with ridicule and subtle puns.

"If someone writes "my blog has been harmonised," they really mean "my blog has been censored." Worse, if a Chinese is "harmonised," he has been "arrested."

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