National Brotherhood Week

This week I had been chatting online with a friend of mine in Beijing about the uprising in Urumqi, the capitol of Xinjiang province. Although the “Great Firewall of China” that has been created by the security services does a marvellous job of filtering many websites that the state does not want the population to have access to, some of the well-known instant messaging and Voice Over IP programs are still semi-reliable ways to communicate.

That is, unless you are living in Urumqi, where the authorities have sporadically shut down all Internet services and mobile phone networks. Chinese state-controlled media–as always–have also done a masterful job of spinning the news coming from this far western Chinese province.