ANALYSIS - Uighur riots may force policy debate in Beijing

By Emma Graham-Harrison

BEIJING (Reuters) - The script is jarringly familiar. Bodies lie on riot-scarred streets of an ethnic minority area, troops fan out, unrest rumbles on and Beijing denounces overseas enemies bent on splitting China.

Less than 18 months ago, when the violence was in Tibet, China's response appeared knee-jerk -- a harsh crackdown and tight security ever since.

But as discontent played out in energy-rich Xinjiang this week, analysts say there was almost certainly a parallel round of debate taking place within the secretive Communist Party -- about where policy on ethnic minorities went wrong.

Conservatives have been in the ascendant in recent years, presiding over a tightening of controls on religion and language and pushing a harsh response to the Tibetan violence that flared ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

But two explosions of deadly rioting barely over a year apart are an embarrassing public challenge to the rule of a government that has brooked little dissent since taking power in 1949.

"Frankly, coming up to the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, it gives China a bit of a black eye to have these on-going problems," said Dru Gladney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College in California.

The Communist Party has for decades swung between hardline policies that aim to crush dissent and weaken ethnic identity and softer approaches that attempt to make minorities feel they can have a dual identity, both Chinese and Tibetan or Uighur.

Those who favour a more conciliatory approach will now likely use the explosions of violence as evidence that Beijing cannot rule its vast hinterlands by coercion alone.