China Digital Times

China news tagged with: Xinjiang (239)

• A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets

  

  The New York Times reports on an important new archeological find in the Taklamakan desert of Xinjiang:

  In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.

  The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest province of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.

  The long-vanished people have no name, because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life and even the language they spoke.

  Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders.

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  • March 15, 2010 8:34 PM

• Yakexi: The New Year’s Hottest Internet Slang?

  

  From the ChinaGeeks blog:

  Recently, the Chinese internet has been abuzz with the term yakexi [亚克西]. According to a post on Baidu’s Baike, yakexi is the Uyghur word for good. The word has been in general use as a brand name for some time now, but it took on new meaning at this year’s Spring Festival Gala, where one of the performances was a song called “The Party’s Policies are yakexi“. Many netizens, finding the song to be excessive in its praises, have taken to mocking it and the word yakexi itself.

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  • February 18, 2010 12:25 AM

• China’s Social Networks Bloom Without Twitter, Facebook

  

  Francois Bougon reports for AFP:

  The 384 million people now online in China, where the need to build connections (guanxi) has always been vital, have fostered an explosion in web networking, led by instant messaging and video-sharing sites QQ and Youku.

  But the government, wary of the power of such networks to quickly mobilise large groups of people, has blocked foreign sites such as Twitter on and off for months, which has guided Chinese users towards domestic firms, experts say.

  “The Chinese government has been deliberately fostering domestic enterprises which are generally much easier to be controlled,” said Xiao Qiang, who heads China Digital Times, a US-based site that monitors web developments in China.

  “This is one of the essential components of the Chinese censorship mechanism, which also creates a trade barrier for the world’s largest Internet market.”

  Twitter and Facebook were cut off nationwide in July amid deadly ethnic unrest in the restive far-western region of Xinjiang. Authorities blamed the spread of the violence in part on agitators who used the web to stoke it.

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  • February 10, 2010 9:40 PM

• Blogger Describes Xinjiang as an ‘Internet Prison’

  

  Josh of the Far West China blog has written a short piece for the BBC on the current situation with Internet access in Xinjiang, where he lives:

  Finally state media hailed the return of Sohu and Sina, two of China’s most popular news portals, but the sites have been completely censored – they are unrecognisable save the logo.

  If you access these sites from Xinjiang, there are no adverts, you can’t log on, email or access the forums. The search function is also unavailable, as is the possibility of changing language. The whole layout looks different – we’re behind a firewall within China’s great firewall.

  People doing business at an international or even national level have been severely inconvenienced. But most people have resigned themselves to this situation.

  People hold out some hope that someday everything will return to the way it was, but the government has given us no timetable.

  » Read more
  • February 4, 2010 1:12 PM

• What Internet? For 20 Million in China, Email, International Calls Cut Off for 6 Months

  

  The Canadian Press reports on the “Internet refugees” who flee Xinjiang in order to get online, since Internet connections in the region have been cut since riots there last July:

  Every weekend, dozens of people pile off the train in Liuyuan, a sandswept town on the ancient Silk Road that’s the first train stop outside Xinjiang, 400 miles (650 kilometres) east of Urumqi, the regional capital.

  “We must get online! We must!” said Zhao Yan, a petite, ponytailed businesswoman from Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. She has rented the same private booth in the Internet cafe every weekend since August in an uphill battle to keep her small trading business going.

  “If this goes on another couple of months, I’ll have to give up,” Zhao said. “I can’t keep up with the outside world, and I’m losing money.”

  Xinjiang residents are without Internet links unless they flee to farflung places like Liuyuan. One customer had travelled 750 miles (1,200 kilometres) just to get online.

  » Read more
  • January 19, 2010 9:10 PM

• Xinjiang Security Funding Increased by 90 Percent

  

  From China Daily:

  Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region government plans to increase its spending on public security by almost 90 percent this year compared to last year to further maintain social stability following last year’s July 5 riot in the regional capital of Urumqi, according to the government’s budget proposal released yesterday.

  The regional government’s spending on public security will reach 2.89 billion yuan ($423 million) this year, up 87.9 percent over last year’s 1.54 billion yuan, according to the budget proposal handed over to deputies of the Xinjiang People’s Congress during a five-day annual conference that kicked off yesterday in Urumqi.

  “The government decided to increase the spending on public security this year to enhance social stability in Xinjiang,” said Wan Haichuan, director of Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region’s finance department.

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  • January 12, 2010 9:43 PM

• China Sees Long-term Stability Struggle In Xinjiang

  

  From Reuters:

  China’s restless far western region of Xinjiang will have to wage a long-term struggle to contain separatist forces and maintain stability there, the region’s top leader was quoted as saying by state media.

  Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi was hit by bloody ethnic rioting last year between majority Han Chinese and minority Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who call the region home, in which at least 197 people died.

  Energy-rich Xinjiang, strategically located in central Asia, has been struck in recent years by bombings, attacks and riots blamed by Beijing on Uighur separatists demanding an independent “East Turkistan.”

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  • January 3, 2010 3:45 AM

• Chinese Muslim Region Adopts Law On National Unity

  

  From AP:

  The government of a restive Chinese Muslim region rocked recently by ethnic strife said Thursday it has adopted what appeared to be a sweeping law barring the spread of views deemed to threaten national unity.

  The far-western, predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang said on its Web site that the vaguely described law on “education for ethnic unity in Xinjiang” was adopted Tuesday at a local legislature session and would take effect in February.

  Nearly 200 people died according to official count in violent ethnic riots that erupted in July between the Muslim Uighurs and the ethnic majority Han Chinese in the oil-rich region that abuts Pakistan and Central Asia. China blames the rioting on overseas-based groups agitating for greater Uighur rights in Xinjiang, but has presented no direct evidence.

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  • December 31, 2009 5:31 AM

• China To Lift Internet, Phone Bans In Xinjiang: State Media

  

  From AFP:

  China plans to restore online access and lift a ban on text messages and international calls in Xinjiang, state media said Tuesday, months after deadly ethnic unrest prompted a communications shutdown.

  The official Xinhua news agency quoted the regional government as saying it had restored access to part of the wire’s website as well as parts of the website of the state-run People’s Daily newspaper.

  “And according to relevant circumstances, (the government) will gradually restore access to other websites and Internet services, and open up mobile text messages and international long-distance phone services,” the report said.

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  • December 29, 2009 3:24 PM

• Chinese Court Sentences 5 to Death in Xinjiang Mayhem

  

  From New York Times:

  A Chinese court has handed down death sentences for five people convicted of participating in the ethnic violence in July that killed nearly 200 people in the far western region of Xinjiang, the authorities there announced Thursday.

  The sentences, after a series of trials this week, bring to 22 the number of people given the death penalty since trials began in September. The court, in the regional capital, Urumqi, gave five other people suspended death sentences, which are often equivalent to life in prison.

  Nine of those sentenced have already been executed, according to the state media.

  The sentences were announced by the Xinjiang regional government and distributed to news outlets.

  » Read more
  • December 24, 2009 10:22 PM

• The Truth about Xinjiang’s Internet Situation

  

  Josh at the Far West China blog gives a rundown on what web users can and cannot access online in Xinjiang:

  How much information is really getting into and out of Xinjiang? Is the internet completely cut or just partially? If so, how am I updating this blog while still living in Xinjiang? And the question on everybody’s mind who has any concern about Xinjiang: when will they turn the internet back on?

  [...] The most common misunderstanding I run into with anybody outside the province is the idea that we have no internet whatsoever. Although true in some ways (all email, Skype, and IM have vanished), the statement is bit misleading. While any internet content, especially for English-speakers, is extremely limited, there is plenty still available to be found in Chinese. It seems to me that the government has basically cut the cord to content that is hosted outside the province, but anything within the province is accessible. So what does that leave us with?

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  • December 6, 2009 8:58 PM

• China Launches “Strike Hard” Crackdown in Restive West

  

  Following the unrest over the summer, the government has launched a “strike hard” campaign in Xinjiang, Reuters reports:

  Now the regional government is demanding tough action to bring stability back to the region, Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily reported on Tuesday.

  “From the start of November, public security bodies in Xinjiang will … start a thorough ’strike hard and punish’ campaign to further consolidate the fruits of maintaining stability and eliminate security dangers,” it said.

  Security forces would “root out places where criminals breed, and change the face of the public security situation in these areas”, the report said.

  The term “strike hard” harkens back to the 1980s, when Chinese police forces launched campaign-like sweeps intended to catch law-breakers. Pro-reform legal experts in China later criticised those campaigns for ignoring suspects’ rights and setting targets for arrests that encouraged abuses.

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  • November 2, 2009 11:09 PM

• Xinjiang’s Bleached Bones and Turquoise Tombs

  

  Paul Mozur, a Taiwan-based correspondent, traveled through Xinjiang shortly after the July riots and filed a three-part report for Asia Sentinel. Read also Parts One and Two. From Part Three:

  Throughout our conversation Iparhan broke off to joke with her Han friend Mei, whom she had brought for an excursion outside the city. Iparhan is typical of more and more Uighurs, who are educated in Mandarin at an increasingly younger age and leave Xinjiang to attend college in eastern China. Though on the surface their integration would seem to neutralize them as potential threats, in many ways they are the greatest threat to China. As Human Rights Watch’s Nicholas Bequelin explains: “The source of political and religious radicalism in Muslim societies has often been people who were both educated and disaffected.”

  Iparhan said there were many others like her. “It is this way everywhere, there is no chance of success opened to us.” It is this fact, she told me, that helped her to see through the propagandistic side of her education. “Many of my Han classmates simply believe what the teachers or the government tells them. If they hear it is foreigners who caused a problem in Xinjiang, they believe it, they don’t ask for proof and they don’t ask why,” she complained. “I think because growing up we know we are a minority and then we see discrimination everyday we learn not to listen to the government.”

  Even if the economic realities on the ground are addressed, Bequelin still believes the region will remain restive. “The promotion of economic development cannot make up for restrictions on cultural expression, and there is no look to change these cultural policies. Ultimately the party leadership is still clenching onto ideological clichés that encourage ethnic polarization.” Across Xinjiang’s urban areas young Uighur kids have become reliable speakers of crisp Mandarin. If in a matter of a decade the Chinese government can succeed in forcing the province’s education system to switch from Uighur to Mandarin, it doesn’t seem unrealistic that it could at least partially succeed in teaching cultural understanding, instead of falling back on banal socialist phrases.

  But for now the government has shown itself content to simply squelch violence and retain stability at all costs.

  » Read more
  • October 16, 2009 1:54 PM

• China Sentences 6 More to Death for Xinjiang Riot

  

  Fourteen more individuals are being tried over the riots in July in Urumqi, after six were sentenced to death last week. From AFP:

  “The trials started at around 10:00 am today and they’re still not over. Fourteen defendants are being tried,” a spokesman for the Xinjiang government, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

  The defendants are charged with murder, robbery, arson and vandalism, the official Xinhua news agency reported, in connection with the violence that left nearly 200 dead — the worst ethnic unrest in China in decades.

  The regional capital Urumqi erupted in chaos on July 5 as members of the Uighur minority — most of whom are Muslims — went on a rampage in attacks directed mainly at members of China’s dominant Han ethnic group.

  The 14 were the last in a batch of 21 people who have so far been charged with crimes relating to the unrest. Six have already been sentenced to death and a seventh sentenced to life in prison.

  Update: AP reports that six more defendants have been sentenced to death in today’s trials:

  Hou Hanmin, a spokeswoman for Xinjiang’s regional government, said six new defendants were sentenced to death and three other people were given life sentences by the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court. Five others were given prison terms, she said, but did not provide details.

  The defendant’s names were not immediately available and it was not clear if they were Uighur.

  On Monday, six Uighur defendants were sentenced to death by the same court. Those sentences were the first to be handed down in the trials of scores of suspects arrested during and after the riots.

  » Read more
  • October 14, 2009 1:43 PM

• The Red and the Black

  

  From The Economist:

  Shortly before the 60th anniversary of communist China’s founding on October 1st, police in the south-western city of Chongqing opened an unusual exhibition. On display, to invited guests only, were 65 luxury cars formerly owned by the bosses of the city’s crime gangs as well as an assortment of jewellery, guns and drugs. Chongqing, the wartime capital of China, had been a hub of organised crime in pre-communist days. Now the gangs are back, with roots in the party that almost wiped them out six decades ago.

  In Beijing the huge military parade on October 1st, China’s first in ten years, was intended to show off a modern, powerful face. The country’s leaders had reason to flaunt their stuff this year. Not only has China made enormous economic and technological strides since 1999, but it has also weathered the global financial crisis with remarkable resilience. Officials had worried that widespread lay-offs in export businesses could lead to social unrest. But, apart from bloody rioting in the far-western region of Xinjiang in July, fuelled mainly by ethnic rivalry, the past few months have seen no obvious increase in the number or scale of protests.

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  • October 10, 2009 8:09 PM

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