China Digital Times

China news tagged with: Xinjiang (175)

• China Casts Wide Net to Curb Terrorism

  

  In The National, Paul Mooney looks at Chinese government claims of terrorist activity in Xinjiang, most recently with the execution of two Uighurs for a violent attack on police officers in Kashgar last August:

  Officials said Abdurahman Azat, 34, and Krubanjan Hemit, 29, were members of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a separatist group the government says has been behind a string of terrorist acts in Xinjiang.

  Experts on Xinjiang say, however, that the organisation no longer exists, it never had more than two handfuls of members, and there is no evidence it was ever involved in terrorist attacks. Some argue it never existed at all.

  The executions came as the Chinese launched a clampdown in the predominantly Uighur cities of Hotan and Kashgar, in southern Xinjiang, in which more than 100 Uighurs have been arrested in recent months, many on charges of engaging in unspecified “illegal religious activities”. The Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group, have long bristled at Chinese control of Xinjiang, which they call East Turkistan.

  [...] Uighurs are perplexed by the claims of terrorism. “They just turn small incidents into big ones,” said a Kashgar taxi driver, when asked about such incidents.

  Many experts on the Xinjiang region say the Chinese rhetoric has been effective, and criticise foreign media for doing a “cut and paste” of official statements when reporting on the issue.

  » Read more
  • April 17, 2009 11:32 AM

• The Strange Tale of a Chinese Emperor’s French Prints

  

  An exhibit at the Louvre Museum in Paris includes prints commissioned by Emperor Qianlong from Louis XV to commemorate a military campaign in today’s Xinjiang. From the New York Times:

  Adhering to Buddhism and occasionally to Christianity, the Uighurs were slowly won over to Islam by the missionaries who arrived from the Persian-speaking cities of Central Asia. None of this made their land a particularly obvious target for China.

  Was the desire to repeat history an incentive? At the height of its maximum extension around the first or second century A.D., the Chinese empire ruled by the Han dynasty nominally controlled the area. Many centuries later, the Mongols overran Uighur lands in the course of their conquests, which embraced territories stretching from the borders of present-day Poland in the west to the Pacific shores of China and included the Middle East. But the great Song dynasty, under which Chinese culture rose to an apex around the 11th or 12th century, showed no interest in such undertakings. Neither did the Ming, who re-established Chinese unity after defeating the Mongol dynasty, who ruled China from 1279 to 1368.

  So what drove the emperor of such an immense country as China to launch his armies across unforgiving deserts into lands where the material surroundings and the living culture bore no connection to his domain? And how on earth did the emperor of China come to commission French artists to make prints reproducing 16 paintings, also by Western artists, as a way of commemorating these conquests?

  » Read more
  • March 31, 2009 10:32 PM

• Clocks Square off in China’s Far West

  

  In China’s Xinjiang, Han Chinese and native Muslim Uighurs live side by side, but time zones apart. From The Los Angeles Times:

  When communist China was formed in 1949, Mao Tse-tung decreed that everybody should follow a single time zone, no matter that the country is as wide as the continental United States.

  But Uighurs, the dominant minority in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, balked at running their lives on Beijing time, which would have them getting up in the pitch dark and going to sleep at sunset.

  [...]

  So the Uighurs follow their own unofficial time, which is two hours earlier — in effect following the dictates of the sun rather than of Beijing, about 2,000 miles away.

  The separate time zones are in fact a metaphor for the chasm between the Uighurs and Han Chinese living in uneasy proximity in Xinjiang. Since 1949, the ethnic Chinese have grown from 9% to more than 40% of the province’s population, and Uighurs accuse the Chinese government of suppressing their culture and faith. The Uighurs are a Muslim people who look more European than Chinese and use a Turkic language sprinkled with Arabic.

  » Read more
  • March 30, 2009 4:15 PM

• Wang Lixiong and Progressive Democracy

  

  China Beat has published the second part of their essay about Wang Lixiong’s book about Xinjiang. From the introduction:

  Having analyzed the issues of colonialism, cultural rights of Uyghur populations, and the question of a Han nationalist revival, Wang Lixiong concludes the book by three “letters” to his Uyghur friend Mokhtar, in which he reframes the discussion on Xinjiang within his more general ideas on political reform in China. His reluctance to consider Xinjiang as “different” from other regions in China (while he is less reluctant to do so in the case of Tibet) is not unproblematic; nonetheless his voice is important because he is a critical intellectual “on the edge” who has visibly not entirely renounced influencing the debate in Beijing policy circles.

  
  Part One of the essay is here.

  » Read more
  • March 19, 2009 9:01 PM

• Man Held in China for Posting Conflict Rumours: Report

  

  A man has been detained in Urumqi for posting information online about protests in Xinjiang. From AFP:

  The man, who was identified only by his surname, Ya, was accused of posting a report on the Internet in January about 500 Uighurs demonstrating against a supposed murder in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, Xinhua news agency said.

  Ya had also written that 16 ethnic Han Chinese had beaten and killed a Uighur, the report quoted a police spokesman for Aksu prefecture, in western Xinjiang, as saying.

  The policeman said that the false account had been online for three hours before it was removed, Xinhua reported.

  Official news reports say that Ya confessed to making up the reports. From China Daily:

  The police said that Ya, in his confession, said he fabricated the story after seeing people fighting in a local entertainment center the previous day.

  The fighting was led a quarrel, in which six Uygur customers spoke loudly while playing games at a recreation center, and then fought with the center’s staffs when the employees persuaded them to speak in an undertone.

  Local police said people involved in that skirmish had been taken into custody.

  Meanwhile, it has also been reported that two people have been sentenced in Xinjiang for staging protests - one for organizing a non-violent rally and another for raising a flag of an independent Uighur republic. AP reports:

  On March 6, Mamatali Ahat was sentenced to eight years in prison after he raised a flag symbolizing an independent Uighur republic, the Washington-based Uyghur American Association said in a statement.

  He raised the flag next to a statue in the city of Hotan depicting China’s communist founder Mao Zedong shaking hands with a Uighur farmer.

  A man who answered the phone at the Hotan Municipal Court but did not want to give his name confirmed the sentence and said details of the case could be found in an official report posted March 9 to the Web site of the law and politics committee of the Xinjiang regional Communist Party.

  [...] On Feb. 26 Abdukadir Mahsum was sentenced to 15 years in prison for organizing demonstrations against religious repression and the death of a well-known Uighur philanthropist while in police custody in the city of Hotan in March 2008, the group said.

  » Read more
  • March 17, 2009 10:46 AM

• Leading Dissident ‘Exiled’ to Chinese Northwest

  

  He Weifang, Beijing University law professor and signatory of the Charter 08 petition, has transferred to Shihezi University in Xinjiang as “pressure from above and below” compelled him to go. From Telegraph:

  He Weifang, 49, a celebrated law professor from Beijing University Law School, packed his bags and set off for two years in the outlying province of Xinjiang where he will teach at a provincial university far from China’s political centre.

  Prof He, a lead signatory of the Charter 08 petition in which hundreds of leading academics called for democratic reform, has refused to withdraw his support for the manifesto despite being interrogated by the Chinese police.

  [...]Officially Prof He’s transfer to Shihezi University in Xinjiang is part of an ‘academic co-operation’ programme but colleagues and co-signatories said the posting of such an eminent professor to such a distant corner of China was intended as clear expression of Party disapproval.

  » Read more
  • March 11, 2009 5:16 PM

• Chinese Intellectuals and the Problem of Xinjiang

  

  China Beat reviews Wang Lixiong’s 2007 book on Xinjiang, “Wo de Xiyu, Ni de Dongtu” (My Far West, Your East Turkestan):

  Wang Lixiong first began to study Xinjiang in 1999, when he travelled there to prepare research for a book along the lines of Sky Burial. He was arrested for photocopying an internal publication, stamped as “secret,” on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (the notorious bingtuan), and attempted suicide in a high-security prison in Miquan before recanting and promising to collaborate in order to obtain his release. He recorded the incident in a short essay entitled Memories of Xinjiang (Xinjiang zhuiji), published in 2001 and reprinted as an introduction to the present volume. In prison, he shared a cell with a Han prisoner accused of economic crimes (“Uncle Chen”), and a Uyghur prisoner arrested in Beijing for organizing a demonstration protesting discrimination (Mokhtar), with whom he entered into a long and ongoing discussion on Xinjiang that forms the backbone of the book.

  In the form of memories of prison conversations with Mokhtar, Wang Lixiong sketches out a preliminary analysis of the “Xinjiang problem,” which he believes has entered a phase of “Palestinization.” He begins with some anecdotal examples of what he calls the Han “colonial attitude,” citing the resistance to “Urumchi time”[1] among local Hans, and their worship of Wang Zhen (1908-1993), Party secretary of Xinjiang from 1949 to 1955

  » Read more
  • March 10, 2009 2:23 PM

• China Plans 59 Reservoirs to Collect Meltwater from its Shrinking Glaciers

  

  The Guardian reports on a new project in Xinjiang that aims to collect water from melting glaciers to address the country’s water problem:

  The far western province of Xinjiang, home to many of the planet’s highest peaks and widest ice fields, will carry out the 10-year engineering project, which aims to catch and store glacier run-off that might otherwise trickle away into the desert.

  Behind the measure is a desire to adjust seasonal water levels and address longer-term concerns that downstream city residents will run out of drinking supplies once the glaciers in the Tian, Kunlun and Altai mountains disappear.

  Anxiety has risen along with temperatures that are rapidly diminishing the ice fields. The 3,800-metre Urumqi No1 glacier, the first to be measured in China, has lost more than 20% of its volume since 1962, according to the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute (Careeri) in Lanzhou.

  The report includes a video.

  » Read more
  • March 5, 2009 9:57 PM

• Kashgar Uighurs Pressured to Shave

  

  In the latest of a series of moves to suppress Uighur expression of ethnic and religious identity, Chinese government officials in Xinjiang are pushing male state employees to shave their facial hair. From Radio Free Asia:

  Authorities in China’s westernmost city of Kashgar are stepping up pressure on government employees to go clean-shaven, and the city’s large ethnic Uyghur population, whose adult males overwhelmingly sport moustaches, aren’t happy about it, residents say.

  Kashgar Prefecture propaganda chief Omerjan Tohti said the tough new line against facial hair aims to make government employees look more presentable, but he acknowledged that the issue has become politicized.

  [...]“Kashgar’s situation is very complicated,” Tohti said. “There are some radical elements politicizing beards and mustaches to incite separatism.”

  » Read more
  • February 21, 2009 11:39 PM

• Jailed Uighur Scholar Offered Job

  

  Radio Free Asia reports that the Chinese government is promising high-paying jobs to Tohti Tunyaz, a Uighur jailed for 11 years, and his wife (a naturalized Japanese citizen) if they will remain in China:

  [Tohti Tunyaz's wife] Rabiye Tohti, 45 and a naturalized Japanese citizen, said in an interview that several of her husband’s professors and a number of journalists had travelled from Japan to Prison No. 3 in Urumqi, in China’s northwesternmost province of Xinjiang, to greet Tohti Tunyaz upon his release on Feb. 10.

  [...said Tohti:] “Three months ago, the authorities asked me many times to come back from Japan. They promised a well-paying job to my husband. They told me they would give me a well-paying job too. ‘Your life in Japan is very difficult—you should come back,’ they said. ‘If you come back you will have a very good life—you will be with your relatives and have a very good life.’”

  [...] Chinese authorities arrested [Tunyaz] in 1998 after he copied a list of historical documents at a public records office in Xinjiang. He was handed an 11-year jail term for allegedly endangering state security.

  » Read more
  • February 10, 2009 10:55 PM

• Uighur Petitioner Turned Away in Beijing (with Video)

  

  Hakim Siyit, a Uighur farmer from Kashgar prefecture in China’s far western Xinjiang Autonomous Region, has been petitioning the Chinese government to compensate Kashgar farmers for heavy losses over compulsory production of long beans.  After appealing to various lower levels of government, Siyit traveled to Beijing to file his complaint, where he was briefly detained and then sent home.  Radio Free Asia has details:

  Hakim Siyit, a farmer from Yengisar county, in Xinjiang’s western Kashgar prefecture, blamed the secretary of the communist party’s county branch for the plan’s failure, which called for all farmers in the county to grow the same crop and did not anticipate oversupply.

  According to China’s law on the Popularization of Agricultural Technology, any entity causing loss to farmers through the forced adoption of technology is required to repay total damages.

  [...]“There are few places left that I haven’t been to for this. I went to the Xinjiang regional government in Urumqi five times. I went to Beijing once. To Kashgar, I made 13 or 14 trips in total,” Siyit said.

  

  Hakim Siyit (Photo: RFA)

  The full article includes a film shot by Siyit in his petition efforts, recording Kashgar farmers’ reactions to news that they would be forced to follow the long bean crop plan for a second time.

  » Read more
  • February 1, 2009 4:44 PM

• Thousands Displaced by Quake in Xinjiang

  

  Reuters reports on an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale that struck near the Kazakh border in China’s Xinjiang province, leaving thousands homeless.

  The earthquake, which measured 5.0 on the Richter scale, hit an area inhabited by the Xibe people, a community originally from Manchuria that established a frontier garrison in Xinjiang during the Qing dynasty.

  It destroyed nearly 200 homes and damaged nearly 3,000 buildings on Sunday morning. No casualties have been reported so far.

  » Read more
  • January 26, 2009 4:07 PM

• China Reports 4th Bird Flu Death In 2009

  

  From AP:

  A woman in China’s far west has died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the Health Ministry said Saturday, the country’s fourth death from the virus this year as the biggest festive season approaches.

  The victim, a 31-year-old woman from Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, had been to a live poultry market before she fell ill on Jan. 10, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing Wang Xiaoyan, a deputy director of the regional health department. She died Friday.

  A woman in eastern China, a teenage boy in southwest China and a woman in Beijing have also died from the disease this month.

  A 2-year-old girl was also sickened with H5N1 but recovered. The Health Ministry said her mother, who like the toddler went to a live poultry market, had died of pneumonia in early January. Doctors said they could not confirm the cause of death.

  » Read more
  • January 24, 2009 7:36 AM

• China Sees Separatist Threats

  

  A white paper on national defense released by the State Council singled out “separatist” threats from Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang. From the New York Times:

  The 105-page paper sought to portray China as a power that would use military force only defensively and sees territorial integrity as the top defense priority.

  According to goals implied in the paper, China also seeks to counterbalance the American military presence in Asia. In several instances, the authors pointed out what they called worrisome aspects of American intervention.

  [...] Certain destabilizing factors outside China are growing, the paper added, singling out American arms sales to Taiwan, which could lead to “serious harm to Sino-U.S. relations as well as peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” China considers Taiwan a breakaway province.

  [...] The white paper grouped separatist forces in Taiwan — meaning supporters of Mr. Chen and his policies — with groups that China says are seeking independence for Tibet and Xinjiang. “Separatist forces working for ‘Taiwan independence,’ ‘East Turkestan independence’ and ‘Tibet independence’ pose threats to China’s unity and security,” the paper said.

  The full text of the white paper is here.

  » Read more
  • January 20, 2009 11:16 PM

• “Chinese Kremlinology” and Google Insights Search - Scientific View of Development

  

  Please click here to see what’s on the treasuresthouhast’s Flickr stream:

  A Google Insights search popularity analysis on the Chinese Communst Party slogan “scientific view of development”

  Who has been busy with homework from propaganda campaigns lately? Would you guess the Tibetans, the Uighurs and other minorities? A search tool that compares search volumes from Google says you’re right! In this case the searches are on “scientific view of development”, a Hu Jintao favorite that will go down somewhere in history next to Jiang Zemin’s “Three Stresses” (sanjiang).

  

  » Read more
  • January 15, 2009 7:52 PM

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