Potential Trouble in the South China Sea?

Powerful interests will converge and compete wherever critical resources are located, an example being the gathering international tensions in the South China Sea.  AlJazeera's "101 East" broadcast has a report on the situation there that suggests how important this sea could be in the future.  Here are some statements worth remembering:

Around half of the world's merchant fleets pass through [this sea] every year carrying an estimated $5 trillion worth of trade. 

The area is also believed to contain valuable oil and gas deposits.   [T]he Spratly Islands' hydrocarbon deposits [are] valued at $26.3 trillion.  [Of course, rights to them are being disputed.] 

The latest tension is at the Scarborough Shoal, a small cluster of uninhabitable islands ... [that]  has valuable resources including fishing, shipping routes and potentially enormous oil and gas deposits.  

After more than two decades of double-digit increases in defense spending, China now has the largest fleet of advanced warships, submarines and long strike aircraft in Asia.

Google identifies a space center in China

The following article:  Does it indicate China's interest in having Central Asia within range?  It may simply be the site where the Chinese have decided to have test facilities for their warheads.  Anyway, the most curious feature of this is that it was Google that identified it.  Presumably, the military satellites have been tracking affairs all over China for a long time.  RLC 

Google Earth Identifies Huge Secret Structures in China’s Gobi Desert
By Ankita Mehta.  International Business Times.  Tuesday, November 15, 2011 4:37 AM EST
 Google Earth has apparently spotted large and unidentified structures in China's Gobi Desert. The satellite images have raised questions over what China could be building in the region, which shares borders with Mongolia and is used for military, space and nuclear programs.
 According to The Telegraph, the area in question is close to the headquarters of the country's space program - Jiuquan, Gansu. The location is also close to a nuclear test site China has since abandoned. The sites are believed to be on the border of  Gansu and Xinjiang provinces in northwestern China, less than 100 miles from Jiuquan.
 The buildings are believed to be shaped in rectangular and circular forms and there are also formations that appear to be runways for airplanes. The two images on Google Earth show deep rectangular shapes that seem to be a mile long and a tangle of bright white-colored intersecting lines noticeable from space. The other image shows huge concentric circles, with three jets parked at their centre.
 An earlier image, taken in 2007, shows a mass of orange blocks, each the size of shipping container, placed in a circle. A recent image, however, shows them to have moved as far as three miles from the original site.
 Although the purpose of the huge structure is unknown, some experts believe it might be an optical test range for missiles.
 Tim Ripley, a defense expert, told The Telegraph that the structures all had similar grids to the ones used at the U.S.'s secret military base in Nevada, Area 51.
 "The picture of the circle looks very like a missile test range, with target and instrumentation set out to record weapon effects. The Americans have lots of these in Nevada - Area 51!" he said.

Signs of the reconfiguration of the world: China bailing out the Europeans

The news that the bailout chief of the Europeans has gone to the Chinese for help marks how much has changed in the world.  The wealth of the Chinese is indeed sufficient to stabilize the Euro, but if a deal takes place it will signify what seems already to have happened:  The Chinese have become far more hegemonic than they even knew, or most of the rest of us have yet recognized.  [Click on the title above for a link to the Reuters report]

Americans are now awakening to the status of their country in the world, that it has been a worldwide hegemon, even though the Americans had no such intention.  The country simply grew into that role almost unintentionally.  It just seemed natural for American companies to reach further out across the globe in search of the things necessary to keep their profits and in effect to keep the country growing.  That the consequence of their outreach was to bring ever greater sectors of the globe into a certain kind of relation with the country was hardly noticed, at least as first.

Now that seems to be happening to the Chinese.  I understand that the new play Chinglish captures the confused difference between what Americans think of China [= the world's new hegemon] and what the Chinese think of their country [= up-and-coming but far from having arrived].  While the Chinese people have yet to grasp China's position in the world the rest of the world marvels to observe a country of more than a billion people growing at a pace more than three times the pace that America has ever grown.  That's the significance of the appeal for China's help by the EU's bailout chief:  it foregrounds the sense that China, whatever its intentions, is about to become the world's new hegemon.

[NB China responded that they are not ready to bail out Europe; link here.]

China's restrained relation to Pakistan

Jane Perlez's report on Pakistani-China relations a while back revealed significant dimensions of that relationship that are worth emphasizing [click on the title for a link to the whole article]:  Pakistan, for all its potentiality to China, is not yet in a position to be useful to China.  Several statements in this text stood out for me:

"Pakistan’s ability to use China to offset its collapsing relations with the United States may be far more limited than it appears, raising the prospect that Pakistan will be left on the world’s periphery once the Americans wind down the war in Afghanistan ..."

"But China’s core interests lie elsewhere — in its competition with the United States and in East Asia, experts say. China has shown little interest in propping up the troubled Pakistani economy, ... [and they] have pulled back on some [projects] as they have come under the threat of terrorism . . . . Last month a large Chinese coal mining company . . .  canceled a $19 billion contract in Sindh Province, citing concerns about security, in particular employees’ safety."

The most important concern about insecurity in Pakistan is that it could spill into Xinjiang. 

“[I]f it’s not stable [in Pakistan] we can’t keep the peace in Xinjiang.”

And the project in Gwadar has stalled. 

The Pakistanis]  "asked China to build a naval base at Gwadar, the port on the Arabian Sea where China completed commercial facilities in 2008. [But they were rebuffed.] ... For the moment, China does not see Gwadar as being of much strategic value, . . .  Since its completion, the port has become a rusting hulk, a destination to nowhere."  

Yes, the original supposition was that it would become a terminal for pipelines from Turkmenistan, via Afghanistan, and possibly from Iran.  Events in Afghanistan have precluded that.  Even so, it is reasonable to suppose that under different circumstances Gwadar could become vitally important -- an issue to be watched.

South China Sea as the emerging center of gravity?

In a recent article in Foreign Policy Magazine (Sept/Oct, 2011) Robert D. Kaplan has argued that the Western Pacific is becoming the world’s new center of naval activity, specifically the South China Sea. Here are some of the assertions in the article:
• East Asia is the center of global manufacturing.
• More than half the world’s merchant fleet tonnage passes through the choke points leading westward from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean
• A third of all maritime traffic passes through these choke points.
• Oil from the Indian Ocean passes through the strait of Malacca is more than six times the amount passing through Suez and seventeen times that through Panama Canal.
• About two thirds of Koreas energy supplies pass through the South China Sea; and 60% of Japans; 60% of Taiwan’s; 80% of China’s crude oil imports come through that choke point.
• South China Sea has 7 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and an estimated 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
• All the nine states that touch the South China Sea are necessarily arrayed against China and therefore inclined to US.
• Energy consumption in Asia will double by 2030.
• South China Sea has become an “armed camp”: China has claimed 12 geographic features; Taiwan one; Vitname 25; Philippines 8; Malaysia 5.
• Defense budgets of Southeast Asian states have increased over the last decade while they have declined in the west: Since 2000 Indonesia has increased 84%, Singapore up 146%; Malaysia up 722%.
• Vietnam has spent 2 billion on Russian submarines and 1 Billion on jet planes.
• Military power has shifted from Europe to Asia “quietly”.
All this makes us wonder: How perceptive are we of the changes taking place in our time? It’s not easy to track shifts in power relationships, taking “power” here to mean military power, and even possibly industrial power. I don’t know Kaplan is right but I do take note of the some of the specific details he musters to develop his point: Shifts in leverage and military capability matter – especially in the long run.

When China wises up, what then?

The issues of our time are becoming more acute. Of course we watch with alarm the affairs in Libya, Syria, and now Britain. But also, over the long term there is the changing attitude of the Chinese toward the United States, whose wealth, along with that of the Japanese, has been holding up the profligacy of the Americans. An article on this by Stephen S. Roach puts it together for us. Below are some quotes from his article. [Click on the title for a link to the whole article.] RLC


Read China's lips: China may soon be fed up with US fiscal intransigence and show it by halting the purchase of the dollar.
Stephen S Roach: 07 Aug 2011 07:53

The Chinese have long admired the economic dynamism of the US. But they have lost confidence in America's government and its dysfunctional economic stewardship.

… ….Senior Chinese officials are appalled at how the United States allows politics to trump financial stability. One high-ranking policymaker noted in mid-July: "This is truly shocking … we understand politics, but your government's continued recklessness is astonishing."

….China recognises that it no longer makes sense to stay with its current growth strategy - one that relies heavily on a combination of exports and a massive buffer of dollar-denominated foreign-exchange reserves. Three key developments led the Chinese leadership to this conclusion:

First, the crisis and Great Recession of 2008-2009 were a wake-up call. ….Second, the costs of the insurance premium - the outsize, largely dollar-denominated reservoir of China's foreign-exchange reserves - have been magnified by political risk. …. Finally, China's leadership is mindful of the risks implied by its own macroeconomic imbalances - and of the role that its export-led growth and dollar-based foreign-exchange accumulation plays in perpetuating those imbalances. Moreover, the Chinese understand the political pressure that a growth-starved developed world is putting on its tight management of the renminbi's exchange rate relative to the dollar - pressure that is strikingly reminiscent of a similar campaign directed at Japan in the mid-1980s.

…With these considerations in mind, China has adopted a very transparent response. Its new, 12th, Five-Year Plan says it all - a pro-consumption shift in China's economic structure that addresses head-on China's unsustainable imbalances. By focusing on job creation in services, massive urbanisation, and the broadening of its social safety net, there will be a large boost to labour income and consumer purchasing power.

…. It moves economic growth away from a dangerous over reliance on external demand, while shifting support to untapped internal demand. In addition, it takes the heat off an undervalued currency as a prop to export growth, giving China considerable leeway to step up the pace of currency reforms.

But, by raising the consumption share of its GDP, China will also absorb much of its surplus saving.

… So China, the largest foreign buyer of US government paper, will soon say, "enough". Yet another vacuous budget deal, in conjunction with weaker-than-expected growth for the US economy for years to come, spells a protracted period of outsize government deficits. That raises the biggest question of all: lacking in Chinese demand for Treasuries, how will a savings-strapped US economy fund itself without suffering a sharp decline in the dollar and/or a major increase in real long-term interest rates?

The cavalier response heard from Washington insiders is that the Chinese wouldn't dare spark such an endgame. After all, where else would they place their asset bets? Why would they risk losses in their massive portfolio of dollar-based assets?

China's answers to those questions are clear: it is no longer willing to risk financial and economic stability on the basis of Washington's hollow promises and tarnished economic stewardship. The Chinese are finally saying no. Read their lips.

Stephen S. Roach, a member of the faculty at Yale University, is Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the author of The Next Asia.

A version of this article first appeared on Project Syndicate.

Another formulation of the issues in Central Asia

I'm glad to see any signs of interest in the growing investment of the Chinese in Central Asia, as is indicated in this opinion piece by Pepe Escobar, even if it seems a bit jargonistic ("Great Game", "pipelinestan", angel of history). In geopolitical terms we can speculate whether the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan is mere the current expression of what augurs to be a century-long power struggle over access and control over the mineral resources of Inner Asia. On that issue China is winning, as Escobar suggests. From Al Jazeera. RLC

Opinion
High stakes in Eurasia's 'New Great Game'
China and Russia will benefit from US mistakes in Afghanistan, and the operation in Libya, gaining influence and energy.

Pepe Escobar Last Modified: 04 Jul 2011 14:39

China is investing on a land-based Central Asian energy strategy - a pipeline-driven New Silk Road from the Caspian Sea to China's Far West in Xinjiang [GALLO/GETTY]
Antonio Gramsci once mused that the old order has died but the new one has not yet been born.

While Washington's geopolitical/energy focus was on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, and to a lesser extent on Central Asia, international politics was already in transition from a unipolar world towards a new, polycentric system.

And then the 2011 Arab Revolt irrupted all across the MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) chessboard, turning all calculations upside down and reconfiguring the relationship between the US, the main Eurasian nations, and Northern Africa.

Time to recall an ultimate Cold Warrior, Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1997, in the article "A Geostrategy for Eurasia", published by Foreign Affairs, conceptualised that: "Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and historical legacy."

US power waning

Fast forward to the first decade of the 2000s. The George W Bush administration devised a strategy for a Great Central Asia according to which the US would roll back Russia's traditional and China's growing influence.

Washington would have New Delhi as the partner of choice in Afghanistan and Central Asia - laying the foundations of a new Silk Road.

And Washington would establish itself not far from Xinjiang, in Western China, and close to Russia's underbelly. Essentially, that's how the US would win the New Great Game in Eurasia.

This strategy was inbuilt in the Pentagon's Long War - codename for the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine - and its far more important, if half-hidden, twin: the global energy war.

In my 2007 book Globalistan, I branded this process as Liquid War; here we would find "liquidity" not only in terms of fast-flowing capital and information shaping liquid modernity (a hat tip to Zygmunt Bauman), but also as in oil/gas pipelines crisscrossing an enormous battlefield, what I have called Pipelineistan.

The problems with the Bush administration strategy may have already started way back in 2003, when Turkey - the bridge par excellence between Central Asia and the Mediterranean - decided not to support the war in Iraq.

Since then, Turkey has gotten closer to Russia and, following Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's concept, in fact all its neighbors, especially Iran - performing what could be called an "escape from the US" - and thus denting its role as a NATO base for penetration into Eurasia.

It's in this context that an Ankara-Tehran-Damascus alliance was solidified (and, incidentally, may now be unraveling). Meanwhile Eurasia as a whole changed at breakneck speed.

Russia was "back" on a continental and also global scale; China and India emerged geo-economically; the US got bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Soon the US was not the "indispensable nation" anymore.

China and Russia

Very few former Soviet states were annexed to the US sphere of influence - as it was expected after 9/11. Moreover, Washington's dream of a line of control stretching from the Mediterranean all the way towards Central Asia, aimed at cutting in two the Eurasian landmass, did not happen.

China and Russia developed a joint Eurasia policy - organised, among other channels, by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Community and now increased military cooperation.

In Pipelineistan terms, China didn't have to send a single soldier (to Iraq) or get bogged down in an infinite quagmire (in Afghanistan); instead it will get plenty of oil from Iraq and much of the natural gas it needs from Turkmenistan.

China is massively investing in a land-based Central Asian energy strategy - a pipeline-driven New Silk Road from the Caspian Sea to China's Far West in Xinjiang.

The US's geopolitical perspective is characteristic of a sea power - framing its relationship with other nations from the position of an "island"; the Mediterranean basin and Central Asia are viewed as placed in a so-called "arc of instability", as defined by Dr Brzezinski.

Over these past few years, in a constantly evolving context, much more than Great Central Asia, what became paramount for Washington was the geopolitical concept of a Great Middle East - expanding on Brzezinski's "arc of instability" and running from the Maghreb all the way to Central Asia.

So as much as Brzezinski conceptualised Central Asia as a volatile and unpredictable "Eurasian Balkans", we had the Bush administration forcefully dreaming of the "birth pangs" of the Great Middle East. The aim was unmistakable; to cause a lot of trouble to the increasing geopolitical union between China and Russia.

Botched operations

In these past few years, up to the - largely botched - Africom/NATO operation in Libya, the US strategy has been aimed at the militarisation of the entire arc between the Mediterranean and Central Asia.

Africom, the US Africa command implemented in 2008 with a headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, has now engaged in its first African war, in Libya. Africom aims at rapid intervention all across Africa but also has its sights on the "New" Middle East and Central Asia.

So now the US strategy can finally be examined in detail as a militarisation of the Mediterranean-Central Asian arch.

That would assure the US a wedge between Southern Europe and Northern Africa; assure military control over Northern Africa and Southwest Asia, with particular emphasis on Turkey, Syria and Iran; and "cut" Eurasia in two. In sum: divide and rule.

So this geopolitical road map was bound from the start to target Syria (already happening); Iran (a perpetual neo-con dream); and even Erdogan's Turkey - all useful for a US advance in Eurasia.

Meanwhile Eurasian powers Russia, China and India - all BRICS member countries - not to mention Iran and Turkey themselves, are slowly calibrating their response.

In the midst of this ever-shifting accommodation of tectonic plates, Afghanistan assumes an even more crucial role. It could - and should - recover its status of crossroads/hub bringing Central Asia and South Asia together. Yet that may ultimately happen not under American sponsorship - but under Chinese and Russian partnership.

The Moscow/Beijing counterpunch is to organise the SCO as a rival to NATO in terms of providing security for Central Asia - and for Afghanistan. Wily Hamid Karzai has seen which way the wind is blowing - and he's all for it.

Moscow and Beijing have decided to enter into "tight cooperation" (their terminology) not only in Central Asia but in the Middle East and North Africa as well; Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao admitted as much in a recent op-ed piece for the Financial Times newspaper.

The wake-up call was the Western intervention in Libya. The Chinese economic/political/diplomatic push will be organised under the aegis of the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

The complex hidden agendas at play in Syria; the unraveling of the Ankara-Tehran-Damascus alliance; the West's double standards over Bahrain; Washington's determination to overstay its military presence in Iraq -these developments are all seen by Moscow and Beijing as part of a strategy to perpetuate Western dominance in the Middle East.

So expect even more feverish moves by the angel of history. Eurasian actors Turkey, Iran, Russia and China will be ever more active in the Mediterranean and Central Asia - the key geostrategic battleground in a 21st century New Great Game that might even be pitting Washington against Eurasia itself.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for the Asia Times. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

The Chinese Navy in the Indian Ocean

In my previous post I noted that the Chinese have spent 1.5 billion dollars in constructing a deep sea port at Gwadar, Pakistan. Today's NYT says Chinese warships are planing to escort their commercial vessels with warships in the Indian Ocean, "from as far as the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca". As recently as March a Chinese warship docked in Abu Dhabi, the first time their warships have docked in the Middle East for years. Gwadar makes the perfect base for such ships. So, what some thought was supposed to be mainly a terminus for a planned pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to the Baluchistan port of Gwadar obviously will have other uses.

Another Pipeline Deal: Signs of the emerging pattern of alliances in Eurasia?

Syed Fazl-e-Haider, author of a book on the development of Baluchistan, has recently published an announcement in Asia Times Online that Iran and Pakistan have signed a final agreement for the construction of a gas pipeline that would serve Pakistan and conceivably might be extended into India. There have been financial difficulties, however, as Pakistan has so far not been able to arrange the cash, the Americans being no help as they are against the deal.  China has a great interest in the agreement and others with Pakistan, and may come to the rescue.  The US has been opposed to much of what the Iranians have tried to do since Khomeini came to power in 1979.

The plan is for Iran to provide 750 million cu ft of gas per day through this pipe for the next 25 years. This is a big for Pakistan, which is 3,000 megawatts short of electric power. Contracts like this seem to me worth a close watch as they are the material and technological links through which goods are transported ever more cheaply and in larger amounts faster from localities of production to consuming communities, the long term effect being to link peoples ever closer together. And their expense helps link political and military interests. These are the physical instruments of world shrinkage and international alliances. That such agreements are being worked out in the face of American opposition is not especially new but it indicates the actual realities of our world -- namely, that local interests trump those of the hegemon whenever possible.

There is more in the offing, according to Fazl-e-Haider: China wants to build a pipeline from Iran to China through Pakistan. That would be a huge project: it would mean taking the pipeline through the Northern Areas of Gilgit-Baltistan where the Khunjerab Pass is over 15,000 feet through one of the highest mountain ranges in the world. Such is China's interest in energy. And such is China's belief that Pakistan is over the long term "safe" territory, safe politically.  China seems to be viewing Pakistan and Iran as long term partners worth establishing enduring ties with.

Deals like this suggest where the world is trending, worth watching with some care.

China's rising influence in Afghanistan -- and elsewhere in Central Asia

The world is changing faster than we can keep track of it. This article on China's investment in Afghanistan is one small indication of the shift in power and influence. China -- whatever its methods -- is bearing down on Central Asia. Lots of resources there for a country whose needs will be huge as it grows into a world power with even greater influence. Ben Farmer of the Sydney Morning Herald gives us a glimpse of how things work in this region, and how they are likely to continue to work in the future. RLC


Afghan revenue to balloon as Chinese influence grows
BEN FARMER Sydney Morning Herald - Nov 23 5:21 AM

KABUL: China's growing influence in the Afghan economy has been hailed by the country's mining minister, who has revealed that projects acquired to feed Beijing's industrial base will triple government revenues within five years.

Muhammad Ibrahim Adel said foreign investment in the country's vast mineral deposits would bring $US2 billion ($2.18 billion) a year in taxes and royalties by 2013.

''Within five years I hope the Government will be getting $US2 billion a year from mining, not including the salaries people earn,'' he said.

Afghanistan has the potential to emerge as one of Central Asia's biggest sources of raw materials for manufacturers.

China paid $US800 million to acquire the Aynak copper deposit 48 kilometres south of Kabul two years ago and has emerged as the favourite from a pool of Indian and Saudi firms to gain control of an iron-ore deposit at Hajigak, 100 kilometres west of Kabul, when tenders are considered next year.

Both deposits rank among the world's largest and entail the construction of roads, processing plants and railways in deprived areas that are dominated by the Taliban.

But the burgeoning role of the Chinese in Afghanistan has provoked a backlash, with allegations of corruption emanating from US officials.

A new FBI-style major crimes unit, set up with British and US police involvement, is reported to have gathered enough evidence to issue arrest warrants against Mr Adel and another member of the cabinet, Sediq Chakari, who is the Minister of Haj and Islamic affairs. A new FBI-style major crimes unit, set up with British and US police involvement, is reported to have gathered enough evidence to issue arrest warrants against Mr Adel and another member of the cabinet, Sediq Chakari, who is the Minister of Haj and Islamic affairs.

Last week The Washington Post quoted a US official who alleged Mr Adel had accepted a $US30 million bribe from the Chinese bidders for Aynak. Mr Adel rejected the accusations.

''I am responsible for the revenue and benefit of our people. All the time I'm following the law and the legislation for the benefit of the people.''

The Chinese firm developing Aynak plans to employ 20,000 Afghan workers at the site and has the reassurance of a massive police presence, backed by security assistance from US special forces.

The facility is also barricaded by sandbags, and a wall of iron shipping containers surrounds the perimeter.

Afghanistan recorded government revenues of $US800 million last year. The World Bank concluded that mining revenues are the best hope of building a recurring income stream for the war-torn economy, which has been blighted by corruption and weak government.

International donors have been left with a bill, which is rising sharply, to prop up the state. The tab includes billions of dollars to train and equip a police force and an army seen as critical to defeating the Taliban.

Uighur Uprising: continued signs of instability along the frontier

The street fighting in Urumqi and Kashgar indicate how much remains unresolved in the relations of power in Central Asia, that is, along the frontier of the former Soviet Union. And also the evident power of the new technology to enable collectivities to organize and coordinate in defiance of central power. The demonstrations in Iran have exposed the raw power that undergirds the system in place there. It is natural to wonder if the Uighur learned how to put it together by reading about the opposition movement in Iran. Could copy-cat movements develop elsewhere? We hear of tensions brewing elsewhere along the old Soviet border, that is, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Georgia. However it was done in Xinjiang, it is not over. Here is the NYTime report. RLC

July 8, 2009
New Protests in Western China After Deadly Clashes
By EDWARD WONG

URUMQI, China — Rival protesters took to the streets again on Tuesday, defying Chinese government efforts to lock down this regional capital of 2.3 million people and other cities across its western desert region after bloody clashes between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese.

The fighting, which erupted Sunday evening, left at least 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, according to the state news agency.

Police fired tear gas on Tuesday at Han Chinese protesters armed with clubs, lead pipes, shovels and hoes, news reports said. Earlier, in an attempt to contain China’s worst ethnic violence in decades, the authorities imposed curfews, cut off cellphone and Internet services and sent armed police officers into neighborhoods.

The official Xinhua news agency said an overnight curfew would again be imposed here on Tuesday night.

Despite the authorities efforts to bring the situation under control, hundreds of Uighur protesters defied the police, crashing a state-run tour of the riot scene for foreign and Chinese journalists.

A wailing crowd of women, joined later by scores of Uighur men, marched down a wide avenue Tuesday with raised fists and tearfully demanded that the police release Uighur men who they said had been seized from their homes after Sunday’s violence. Some women waved the identification cards of men who had been detained.

As journalists watched, the demonstrators smashed the windshield of a police car and several police officers drew their pistols before the entire crowd was encircled by officers and paramilitary troops in riot gear.

“A lot of ordinary people were taken away by the police,” a protester named Qimanguli, a 13-year-old girl clad in a white T-shirt and a black headscarf, said, crying. She said her 19-year-old brother had been detained on Monday, long after the riots had ended.

The initial confrontation later ebbed to a tense standoff between about 100 protesters, mostly women, some carrying infants, and riot police in black body armor and helmets, tear-gas launchers at the ready, in a Uighur neighborhood pocked with burned-out homes and an automobile sales lot torched during the Sunday riots.

But soon afterward, news reports said, hundreds of Han Chinese threw rocks and smashed shops owned by Uighurs, ignoring police who appealed to them over loudspeakers to disperse. At one point, some 300 Han Chinese marchers seemed to be heading toward a mosque, only to face clouds of tear gas, news reports said. And at one point, rival groups of protesters clashed until riot police moved in to set up a barrier between them, cheered on by Han Chinese protesters, Reuters reported.

The bloodshed here, along with the Tibetan uprising last year, shows the extent of racial hostility that still pervades much of western China, fueled partly by economic disparity and by government attempts to restrict religious and political activity by minority groups.

The rioting, which began as a peaceful protest calling for a full government inquiry into an earlier brawl between Uighurs and Han Chinese at a factory in southern China, took place in the heart of Xinjiang, an oil-rich desert region where Uighurs are the largest ethnic group but are ruled by the Han, the dominant ethnic group in the country.

Protests spread Monday to the heavily guarded town of Kashgar, on China’s western border, as 200 to 300 people chanting “God is great” and “Release the people” confronted riot police officers about 5:30 p.m. in front of the city’s yellow-walled Id Kah Mosque, the largest mosque in China. They quickly dispersed when officers began arresting people, one resident said.

Internet social platforms and chat programs appeared to have unified Uighurs in anger over the way Chinese officials had handled the earlier brawl, which took place in late June thousands of miles away in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province. There, Han workers rampaged through a Uighur dormitory, killing at least two Uighurs and injuring many others, according to the state news agency, Xinhua. Police officers later arrested a resentful former factory worker who had ignited the fight by spreading a rumor that six Uighur men had raped two Han women at the site, Xinhua reported.

But photographs that appeared online after the battle showed people standing around a pile of corpses, leading many Uighurs to believe that the government was playing down the number of dead Uighurs. One Uighur student said the photographs began showing up on many Web sites about one week ago. Government censors repeatedly tried to delete them, but to no avail, he said.

“Uighurs posted it again and again in order to let more people know the truth, because how painful is it that the government does bald-faced injustice to Uighur people?” said the student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the government.

A call for protests spread on Web sites and QQ, the most popular instant-messaging program in China, despite government efforts to block online discussion of the feud.

By Tuesday morning, more than 36 hours after the start of the protest, the police had detained more than 1,400 suspects, according to Xinhua. More than 200 shops and 14 homes had been destroyed in Urumqi, and 261 motor vehicles, mostly buses, had been burned, Xinhua reported, citing Liu Yaohua, the regional police chief.

Police officers operated checkpoints on roads throughout Xinjiang on Monday. People at major hotels said they had no Internet access. Most people in the city could not use cellphones.

At the local airport, five scrawny, young men wearing black, bulletproof vests and helmets stood outside the terminal, holding batons. The roadways leading into the city center were empty early on Tuesday, except for parked squad cars and clusters of armored personnel carriers and olive military trucks brimming with paramilitary troops. An all-night curfew had been imposed.

Residents described the central bazaar in the Uighur enclave, where much of the rioting took place, as littered with the charred hulks of buses and cars. An American teacher in Urumqi, Adam Grode, and another foreigner said they had heard gunfire long after nightfall Sunday.

Xinhua did not give a breakdown of the 156 deaths, and it was unclear how many of them were protesters and how many were other civilians or police officers. There were no independent estimates of the number of the death toll. At least 1,000 people were described as having protested.

Photographs online and video on state television showed injured people lying in the streets, not far from overturned vehicles that had been set ablaze. Government officials gave journalists in Urumqi a disc with a video showing bodies strewn in the streets.

The officials also released a statement that laid the blame directly on Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur businesswoman and human rights advocate who had been imprisoned in China and now lives in Washington. It said the World Uighur Congress, a group led by “the splittist” Ms. Kadeer, “directly ignited, plotted and directed the violence using the Shaoguan incident in Guangdong.” The statement said bloggers first began calling for the protest on Saturday night and also used QQ and online bulletin boards to organize a rally at People’s Square and South Gate in the Uighur quarter of Urumqi.

The World Uighur Congress rejected the accusations and said that it condemned “in the strongest possible terms the brutal crackdown of a peaceful protest of young Uighurs.” The group said in a statement on Monday that Uighurs had been subject to reprisals not only from Chinese security forces but also from Han Chinese civilians who attacked homes, workplaces or dormitories after the riots on Monday.

The violence on Sunday dwarfed in scale assaults on security forces last year in Xinjiang. It was deadlier, too, than any of the bombings, riots and protests that swept through the region in the 1990s and that led to a government clampdown.

Uighurs make up about half of the 20 million people in Xinjiang but are a minority in Urumqi, where Han Chinese dominate. The Chinese government has encouraged Han migration to many parts of Xinjiang, and Uighurs say that the Han tend to get the better jobs in Urumqi. The government also maintains tight control on the practice of Islam, which many Uighurs cite as a source of frustration.

But an ethnic Han woman who lives in an apartment near the central bazaar said in a telephone interview that the government should show no sympathy toward the malcontents.

“What they should do is crack down with a lot of force at first, so the situation doesn’t get worse, so it doesn’t drag out like in Tibet,” she said after insisting on anonymity. “Their mind is very simple. If you crack down on one, you’ll scare all of them. The government should come down harder.”

Michael Wines, Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting from Beijing, and David Barboza from Shanghai. Huang Yuanxi contributed research from Beijing, and Chen Yang from Shanghai.