Income gaps, corruption fuel China riots

Goverment blames terrorists, separatists

It immediately branded last year's uprising in Tibetan areas and this month's riot in Xinjiang as the work of terrorists, separatists and malign foreign forces, suggesting a plot to carve up China. Such language obscures these groups' grievances over government policies and feeds stereotypes among some Chinese that the Uighurs were ungrateful for the state's largesse.

The approach is unlike Beijing's treatment of unrest elsewhere in China, in which officials express sympathy and then often funnel cash payments to quiet disgruntled unemployed laborers, dispossessed farmers and others at the center of local protests.

The strategy is known as "spending money to buy stability." Over the past month, state media has begun to question the tactic, running articles adding a modifier to the phrase: "spending money to buy temporary stability."

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