It extends well into areas of the city where ethnic Han Chinese form the majority.
State media reports said most of the workers were ethnic Han Chinese, with two reported to be ethnic Tibetans.
For most Chinese observers, what happened was an outburst of vicious racist thuggery directed at ethnic Han Chinese in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
During the night, a lorry driven by an ethnic Han Chinese driver hit one of the herders, called Mergen (single-named, like many Mongols).
The rail link to Lhasa brought disproportionate benefits to ethnic Han Chinese whose language and culture enabled them to take quicker advantage of the Han tourist influx.
For both the Uighurs and the Tibetans, economic development has been inseparable from immigration by ethnic-Han Chinese, 92% of China's population.
Sure enough, ethnic-Han Chinese, many of them recent migrants hoping to profit from a train-related tourism boom, were the main targets of the violence in Lhasa.
When protests erupted in Inner Mongolia after the death in May this year of an ethnic-Mongol herder allegedly when he was run over by a coal-lorry driven by an ethnic-Han Chinese the response in Mongolia itself was muted.
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China wrongly blamed him for the ferocious ethnic attacks on Han Chinese in riots in Lhasa, in 2008.
When conflict broke out in 2009 with the Kokang, an ethnic-Han-Chinese minority, 37, 000 people fled to China, provoking sharp criticism of the Burmese junta.
The Han Chinese are the country's dominant ethnic group, and the Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority who consider Xinjiang their homeland.
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Woeser, a Tibetan poet and blogger, says that some ethnic-Tibetan officials privately complain about the clampdown, but Han Chinese officials in Tibet toe a uniformly hard line.
Some protesters advocated independence from China, while others demonstrated against the growing influence of the Han Chinese in the area and other regions of China with ethnic Tibetan populations.
More than half its people are Han Chinese, but the area is home to more than 40 different ethnic groupings, including Tibetans, Hui and Mongols.
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