One month after a traffic fatality touched off widespread protests in the northern Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, a court has sentenced a coal truck driver to death for running over and killing an ethnic Mongolian herder. The rapid trial and sentencing showed the speed with which Chinese authorities have moved to tamp down unrest in the region.
On Wednesday the Intermediate People’s Court of Xilin Gol league found driver Li Lindong guilty of murder immediately after a six-hour trial, Chinese state press reported. The court ruled that Li had intentionally run over and dragged Mergen, who like some ethnic Mongolians goes by a single name. Mergen was part of a group of herders who had blocked coal trucks to protest the damaged they caused to traditional herding lands. A fellow defendant who had been in the cab of the truck with Li was sentenced to life in prison, and two other men were given three-year sentences for interfering with the police investigation.
Mergen’s May 10 killing touched off a series of protests in the frontier region, where decades of immigration by China’s Han majority have raised complaints about the exploitation of natural resources and the decline of the traditional culture of ethnic Mongols, who now comprise 20% of Inner Mongolia’s population. Mergen’s killing was followed five days later by the death of another Mongolian, Yan Wenlong, who was crushed by a forklift during a protest at a coal mine. Chinese authorities responded swiftly to the protests, dispatching thousands of armed police, blocking Mongolian students from leaving campuses and restricting discussion of the events on Chinese websites.
In recent years China has seen deadly race riots in other border regions with large minority populations including Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009. But the Inner Mongolia protests were particularly unsettling for the government. While there is a small movement of Mongolians who would like Inner Mongolia to split from China and form an independent state or join with the nation of Mongolia to the north, the region has been largely free of the sort of unrest seen in China’s western frontier regions. As with the Tibet and Xinjiang riots, the Chinese government placed the blame on outsiders. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu accused “overseas groups” of seizing on the deaths to “cause trouble.” She said the government would deal with the cases according to the law and address the broader grievances raised. Last week an official with the Ministry of Environmental Protection told a press conference that China would restrict projects in environmentally sensitive parts of Inner Mongolia.
In China, high-profile criminal cases that arouse public anger and attention sometimes see rapid trials. The time between Mergen’s death and the sentencing of his killer was just over four weeks. Last year a man who stabbed to death eight children at a primary school in southeastern Fujian province was sentenced to death just over two weeks after he committed the murders. He was executed 20 days later.
