The protesters, mainly Uyghur and Hui, initially conducted an orderly march in the previous days and demanded that the government should destroy Sexual Customs and punish the two authors of the book (who used the pseudonyms "Ke Le" and "Sang Ya"), who were compared to Salman Rushdie in a reference to the controversy around The Satanic Verses.
[2][3] However, the protest ended up rioting, where nearly 2,000 rioters overthrew cars, smashed windows and some attacked staff at CCP office.
The government dispatched 1000 policemen and 1200 armed police soldiers to disperse the crowd and arrested 173.
Smaller scale demonstrations took place in, Shanghai, Inner Mongolia, Wuhan, and Yunnan.
[5][3] In response, the Chinese government banned the book, publicly burnt 95,000 copies of it in Lanzhou, and sentenced the authors to terms in jail.