China deployed more security forces into the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia ahead of planned protests Monday over the hit-and-run death of an ethnic Mongolian herder earlier this month.
Businesses contacted by phone said Monday that police are out in force across the sprawling region and Internet access to several areas has been slowed down or cut off.
The U.S.-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights information Center said a region-wide demonstration was planned for Monday and urged people to protest in front of Chinese embassies around the world.
The state-run Inner Mongolian Daily reported Sunday that the region’s Communist Party chief Hu Chunhua met with students and teachers late last week and told them that suspects in the road death and in a separate fatality will be punished “severely and quickly.”
Reports of the Hu meeting followed six days of protests in the vast northern region by hundreds of herders and students.
Ethnic Mongolians, who number less than 20 percent of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region’s population, have long complained of being marginalized by China’s dominant ethnic Han group, whose members have migrated to the region to mine its vast coal reserves.
On May 10, herders angry at coal truckers for driving over their grazing lands, blocked a road in the region. One protester was struck and killed by a truck in the confrontation, and two suspects were taken into custody.
In the second case days later, residents tried to stop operations at a coal mine to protest air and water pollution linked to the mining operation. State media said the fatality occurred when a mine worker drove a forklift into a protester’s car.
