In the latest sign of renewed strain, China has harshly condemned Japan for allowing a group of exiled Uighur activists to hold a major conference in Tokyo this week. China considers the group, the World Uyghur Congress, an “anti-China separatist organization.” Calling it a private group, Tokyo says it won’t interfere with its activities.

In a signal of its dissatisfaction with Tokyo’s Uighur position, China failed to arrange a bilateral meeting between Premier Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihko Noda last Sunday in Beijing, where the two nations and South Korea agreed to start formal negotiations for a trilateral free-trade agreement. To the annoyance of Japanese officials, Mr. Hu did meet bilaterally with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.

Then Tuesday came the abrupt cancellation of a scheduled meeting between Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and the visiting Hiromasa Yonekura, head of Japan’s powerful Keidanren business lobby. Chinese officials didn’t have an immediate comment.

As tensions rise in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, where there has been flashes of violence due to ethnic tensions, Kadeer and hundreds of Uighurs are lobbying for independence in Tokyo. The Telegraph adds:

The exiled head of the World Uyghur Congress, Rebiya Kadeer told those assembled that Beijing’s policy of “forcible assimilation” was unacceptable in a modern democracy.

“The Chinese government says it is assimilating and eventually eliminating the Uighur people and other indigenous people… meanwhile China is becoming a global power,” she told the opening of the congress.

“We are peacefully struggling and hope the Chinese government will stop the repressing of Uighur people… and take political reforms to change their authoritarian rule.

China considers the WUC a “splittist” organisation and has condemned Japan’s issuing of a visa for Kadeer, who last visited the country in 2009.

Beijing also recently expressed discontent over British Prime Minister David Cameron’s meeting with the Dalai Lama.

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Post tags: ethnic tensions, Japan, Rebiya Kadeer, Uighurs, Xinjiang
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Vice President of China Xi Jinping’s Turkey visit in February 2012 and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s China visit in April 2012 are clear show of a historical turning point in the bilateral relations. Those visits were the last of the top-level meetings between the two countries since 2009 and can be interpreted as a sign of huge developments in the Turkish-Chinese relations.

[...]Premier of China Wen Jiabao’s Turkey visit in October 2010 also gave a strategic meaning to the bilateral relations. Aims including the increase of the bilateral trade volume from 17 billion to 50 billion dollars within five years and using the Turkish lira and yuan for trade instead of the dollar indicate the changes in the balance of the global political economy.

These aims were reemphasized during the visit of Vice President Xi Jinping in February 2012 and then the visit of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s in April 2012. Close relations, especially in nuclear energy and railways, are projected for the two countries. Turkey is planning to set up an almost 5,000 kilometer-long rail network with Chinese firms. The project of a “modern silk road” that has been discussed for twenty years but has not been realized is highly significant for Turkey’s trade with China, the Caucasus and Central Asian countries. The route of a “silk railway” from China to Europe will both increase the level of trade and expand the economic integration between countries along the route.

After the 2009 Xinjiang protests, Erdogan was vocal in his disdain for the “atrocities” Beijing afflicted on China’s Uighur population. The first stop on his trip was Urumqi, capital of China’s sensitive Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The Uighur people, who make up 45% of the population in the region, are a Turkic ethnic group with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties to the people of Turkey (indeed, the Uighur language has been called Eastern Turkish, and the term East Turkestan is a common and politically charged toponym for Xinjiang). The Wall Street Journal reports on Erdogan’s reception in Urumqi:

The Turkic people of [the] region greeted Mr. Erdogan like a rock star, and little wonder. While trade and investment, renewable energy, Syria and a nuclear summit with Iran were high on the agenda, showing support and sympathy for the Uighur people appeared to be equally important to the prime minister. They rarely enjoy such vocal support from foreign leaders.

 Mr. Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made a point of embracing Uighurs like long-lost brothers. The delegation of 300 visited a market and a mosque, and even though Beijing reportedly tried to keep Mr. Edrogan’s schedule under wraps, Uighurs lined up in the streets to catch a glimpse. Turkish commentator Fatih Altayli said he had never seen this level of love and affection for the prime minister in any other ethnically Turkic country.

On his visit to China – the first by a Turkish prime minister in 27 years – Erdogan was keen not to upset the apple cart.

He scored the political coup of visiting Urumqi – actually, his first stop on entering China, before he continued onward to Beijing – but did not antagonize his hosts by posturing as the protector of Xinjiang’s Uighurs.

[...][Emre] Kizilkaya, [foreign affairs editor of Turkey's Hurriyet Daily] took Erdogan to task for using the China visit to harp on Syria, instead of succoring Turkey’s Uighur brethren:

OK, China was a world power, but why did you go to Xinjiang if you would remain silent about the inhumane repression against Uyghurs?

The Turkish leader is able to take what some analysts call a dual-track approach – engaging Beijing on economic interests and retaining the right to criticize its rights record – because of a convergence of strategic interests, Turkel [former president of Uyghur American Association] argues:

“Beijing recognizes both Turkey’s influence in the Muslim world and China’s own increased strategic and economic interests in Islamic countries. Thus, while Mr. Erdogan’s statements and Turkey’s stance on the Uyghur  issue have inevitably complicated Sino-Turkish relations, Beijing can’t afford to cut off dialogue with Ankara, and is even willing to tolerate visits by Turkish officials to Xinjiang as the price of summits in Beijing.”

Ankara’s leverage on defending Uyghur  rights would be enhanced if other Central Asian states took a similar stance, he suggests, and it should consider joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to counter Beijing’s use of the grouping as an ‘authoritarian internationale’ forexercising its soft power and suppressing Uyghur  rights:

“Ankara can also lead in rallying democracies further afield to press for improvements in Xinjiang. As a longstanding ally of the U.S. and a neighbor of Europe, Turkey is uniquely well-situated to do this. As an initial step, Foreign Minister Davutoglu should organize a “friends of Uyghur s” conference with democratic allies—similar to the ones organized for Libya and Syria—discussing Ankara’s vision and policy objectives with respect to the Uyghur  people in China.”

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Post tags: East Turkestan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, turkey, Uighurs, Xinjiang
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Chinese authorities closed 16 websites and detained six people responsible for “fabricating or disseminating online rumors,” the State Internet Information Office (SIIO) and Beijing police said Friday ….

An undisclosed number of people who had disseminated similar rumors on the Internet were also “admonished and educated,” who have shown intention to repent, the police said.

The SIIO spokesman also said with regard to a number of rumors having appeared on weibo.com [Sina Weibo] and t.qq.com [Tencent Weibo], the two popular microblogging sites have been “criticized and punished accordingly” by Internet information administration authorities in Beijing and Guangdong respectively.

The spokesman did not elaborate what the punishment was, but said the two websites had pledged to “strengthen the management.”

Part of their punishment now appears to be a three-day suspension of comments on both Sina and Tencent Weibo (making them “more like Twitter for 72 hours”, in the words of Baidu’s Kaiser Kuo). From The Wall Street Journal:

In notices on their websites, Sina and Tencent said the commenting shutdown would last until Tuesday morning, though they will still allow users to make original posts and to repost the posts of others. The companies didn’t say whether the government was involved in the matter. A Sina public-relations representative said the action was taken in response to a growing number of rumors and illegal information on its site recently, not because of a specific incident.

The Economist recently described China’s current approach to online rumour management as a blend of two historical examples:

In the year 15AD, during the short-lived Xin dynasty, a rumour spread that a yellow dragon, a symbol of the emperor, had inauspiciously crashed into a temple in the mountains of central China and died. Ten thousand people rushed to the site. The emperor Wang Mang, aggrieved by such seditious gossip, ordered arrests and interrogations to quash the rumour, but never found the source. He was dethroned and killed eight years later, and Han-dynasty rule was restored.

The next ruler, Emperor Guangwu, took a different approach, studying rumours as a barometer of public sentiment, according to a recent book “Rumours in the Han Dynasty” by Lu Zongli, a historian. Guangwu’s government compiled a “Rumours Report”, cataloguing people’s complaints about local officials, and making assessments that were passed to the emperor. The early Eastern Han dynasty became known for officials who were less corrupt and more attuned to the people.

The recent spate of rumours has shifted the balance further towards the more draconian policies. But new China superblog Rectified.name argued that the crackdown may prove counterproductive:

Once again, the reaction has become the news. Just when it seemed like crazy rumors of a possible coup in the capital were mostly a jape, easily traced back to a certain heavy-breathing religious society based in the US, the CCP leadership has taken direct aim at the tops of their imported Italian loafers and pulled the trigger. The story had already largely played itself out in the foreign press.

There are also specific doubts about the effectiveness of the comment suspension. From Ministry of Tofu:

Pan Shiyi (@潘石屹), chairman of SOHO China, the country’s biggest property developer, asked, “In order to prevent circulation of rumors, they disabled ‘comment’, but not ‘repost/share’? Is this an adequate remedy for the disease?” Pan boasts 9.5 million fans ….

Jeremy Goldkorn, Beijing-based media personality and founder of the popular China media website Danwei.org, shared Pan Shiyi’s post and added, “Disabling comments is not a remedy to treat the disease, but a way to remind you who your grandfather (slang for boss) is.”

Tea Leaf Nation surveyed Sina Weibo users’ reactions to the rumour crackdown (before the comment suspension was announced):

Netizens responded with anger and typical irreverence. @下流社会上等人 fumed, “This isn’t fair. Time was SARS was called a rumor, and it turned out to be true.” @下流社会上等人 complained, “Everything in China is backwards. Rumors aren’t shut down, and what’s true is shut down.” But @帝都二货 defended the government, tweeting, “It’s okay to seek democracy, freedom, and criticize the government. But you can’t spread rumors!”

@高超_ offered a humorous take, writing that shutting down websites spreading falsehoods “means that we’ll discover tomorrow that Xinhua and CCTV.com aren’t reachable.”

How and why are Sina and Tencent still breathing after today’s maelstrom? Perhaps @绅士豪情 put it best, tweeting, “Other sites have been shut but Sina is still there, this shows how formidable they are.”

Size and popularity may indeed offer the two giants some measure of protection from the authorities, but the comment suspension demonstrates that it has limits. There was already widespread speculation of looming trouble for Sina Weibo over its perhaps half-hearted enforcement of government-mandated real name registration. Critics such as Chinese Human Rights Defenders had called the requirement’s announcement “the most alarming development in 2011″ in terms of online controls, but it appeared to have little immediate chilling effect, with apparent registration numbers well below the 60% Sina claimed to expect.

In a postscript to his guide to circumventing the real-name requirement, Charles Custer mused at Tech In Asia: “It’s interesting that Sina’s real-name system continues to be so easily avoided. Obviously, this benefits Sina, but could it put the company in danger if regulators interpret the laxness as Sina not taking their orders seriously? Only time will tell.” After the announcement of unspecified punishment on Saturday, he elaborated:

… People who suggest the government wouldn’t shut down weibo because it’s too popular may be forgetting that just a few years ago, the government turned off basically the entire internet in Xinjiang, a province with over twenty million inhabitants, for months after unrest occurred there. If they think weibo poses a real threat to social stability, they will not hesitate to pull the plug.

But it will never come to that, because Sina and Tencent aren’t stupid. They may have been playing fast-and-loose with the real name regulation rules so far, but they both understand that complying with regulators is the only way a company can do business in China. (Don’t believe me? Ask Google.) So, if you’re on weibo, expect to see significant changes in the months ahead (and maybe don’t retweet those coup rumors unless you’re interested in getting to know your local State Security agents a bit better).

Update: Xinhua summarised a Saturday People’s Daily op-ed which urged readers not to be confused by rumours, saying that China would need “clear head and a firm stand” if it was to avoid “distraction”:

Only by being fearless of risks, undisturbed by external noise and unconfused by gossip and rumors can China solidly “seek progress while ensuring stability,” according to a commentary carried by the Saturday edition of the People’s Daily ….

“Adhering to the overall tone of seeking progress while ensuring stability and the outlook of a scientific development, China is certain to realize longer lasting development,” the article was quoted as saying.

Historically, “stability” can produce a scientific and enduring progress, said the commentary, noting the country’s “splendid achievements” in the past “steady” 33 years.

But Columbia University’s Guobin Yang pointed out that the spread of rumours was partly a result of the government’s own opacity and manipulation, tweeting that “of course rumors thrive for lack of reliable information channels“. China Media Project’s David Bandurski told The New York Times that “the whole idea of rumors and interest in accuracy is a ruse. It’s a moniker for control.”

Xinhua also reported the results of another online spring cleaning campaign (link now broken): 1,065 arrests and over 208,000 “harmful” messages deleted. The original report was soon deleted as well, but for now remains accessible at China Radio International:

The operators of more than 3,117 websites have received related warnings, a spokesman from the city police’s cybersecurity department said Saturday, adding that 70 Internet companies that defied the warnings have received administrative punishments, including forced closures.

The spokesman said the campaign, dubbed “Spring Breeze,” mainly targets the dissemination of information related to smuggling firearms, drugs and toxic chemicals, as well as the sale of human organs, the counterfeiting certificates and invoices and trade in personal information.

The crackdown is meant to address prominent public complaints about Internet-related crimes, the spokesman said, adding that reports about Internet-related crimes have gone down 50 percent since the campaign was launched on Feb. 14.

Finally:

Nice joke on Kaifu Lee’s Sina Weibo: Foreign reporter: “How will you harmonize Weibo?” Chinese government spokesman: “No comment.”

— Matthew Stinson (@stinson) March 31, 2012

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, microblogging, rumors, sina weibo, tencent, weibo, Xinjiang, Xinjiang internet
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The man’s name — Abudukeremu Mamuti in Chinese — suggested he was from the mainly Muslim Uighur minority that populates the northwestern region and has long complained of political and religious oppression under Chinese rule.

According to a statement posted on an official Xinjiang judicial website, the defendant started preaching “religious extremism” last year and recruited people to form a “terrorist group”.

Then on February 28, he gathered all members at his home, armed them with knives and hatchets and took them to the market in Yecheng town — which belongs to the wider Kashgar prefecture — the statement said late Monday.

There, they killed 13 people on the spot and injured 16 others — two of whom later died of their injuries. Mamuti was detained on the scene and seven other attackers were shot dead. One other suspect also later died.

Since 2009, security has been high in the region due to ethnic tensions between Uighur and Han communities. Reuters reports on the location of Xinjiang in a region where China, India and Pakistan all have strategic interests:

China is extremely sensitive to Western suggestions that it mistreats or puts restrictions on Uighurs. Beijing often blames what it calls violent separatist groups in Xinjiang for attacks on police or other government targets, saying they work with al Qaeda or militants in ex-Soviet Central Asia to bring about an independent state called East Turkestan.

Some Chinese officials have also blamed attacks on Muslim militants trained in Pakistan. Yecheng, also known by its Uighur name of Kargilik, is close to the disputed region of Kashmir, ruled in part by India and Pakistan.

But exiled Uighur groups and human rights activists say China overstates the threat posed by militants in Xinjiang.

The Chinese foreign ministry said the Yecheng incident should not be overblown and that it firmly opposes “a small group of violent terrorists and separatists destroying” the region’s peaceful development.

According to the BBC, China is blaming groups that are linked to al-Qaeda for the violence, but exiled Muslim Uighur community and human rights activists claim that this is an overstatement of the threats in Xinjiang.

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Post tags: death penalty, terrorism, Uighurs, Xinjiang, Xinjiang violence
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Nur Bekri, the top government official in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, said Chinese officials believe the Pakistani government opposes recent attacks directed at China. Nonetheless, the unusually explicit comments during a high-profile legislative session suggest growing concern over Islamabad’s inability to fight terrorism.

…

“We have discovered some East Turkestan activists and terrorists from our neighboring country have countless links,” Mr. Bekri said during a meeting in Beijing of the National People’s Congress, China’s legislative body, which meets once a year.

…

Mr. Bekri’s comments follow earlier claims in August by the city government of Kashgar, in far western Xinjiang, that suspected assailants there had received explosives and weapons training in terrorist camps across the border in Pakistan.

Analysts have said the increasingly public accusations suggest Beijing is either unhappy with Islamabad’s counterterrorism efforts or is keen to show that attacks in Xinjiang originated abroad.

More fighting took place in Xinjiang last week, with as many as 20 reported dead,  as tensions escalate amid a police crackdown on Uighurs in the frontier province. But Bekri added that despite the violent activities taking place in Xinjiang, and any potential involvement by groups outside of China, Pakistan remains an “all-weather friend,” according to Xinhua News.

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Post tags: National People's Congress, Pakistan, Uighurs, Xinjiang, Xinjiang violence
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• Signing 08 Charter (the document for which Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 10 years in jail);
• Attending, or expressing interest in, Jasmine gatherings;
• Signing online appeals, in one case, for improving prison management; in another, against the detention of a Uighur scholar;
• Intent to attend events organized by Ai Weiwei (this was before Ai Weiwei was detained and held for 86 days last year);
• Attending the memorial of a woman who self-immolated to protest against violent demolition;
• Writing blogs or articles on the themes of democracy and freedom, about June 4th, Tibet or Xinjiang;
• Twitter expressions;
• Sending a bouquet to the Norwegian Hall of Shanghai Expo in connection to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo;

Cao’s second post describes the typical content of a tea-drinking session, and the spectrum of invitees’ reactions, from defiance to fear or sadness:

Hecha, it appeared, doesn’t involve beating or sustained verbal abuse. That’s because it is the “low end” of the government intimidation and persecution, and depending on how big a threat you are in their perception, things can become much worse ….

Some people dealt with their hecha sessions with composure and even playfulness, others left useful advice, such as “be firm and you have done nothing wrong ….”

One way or the other, it is hard to exaggerate the kind of fear hecha can strike into ordinary people. It lays bare the fact that the state has every power over you, is prepared to use it in the most wanton way, while you no power, no rights, and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself.

See more on tea-drinking at CDT, including the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon’s entry on the term, translations of several first-hand accounts, and some tongue-in-cheek advice for tea-drinkers.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, drinking tea, DSD, interrogation, June 4th, Liu Xiaobo, Tibet, Twitter, Xinjiang
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The claim of responsibility is likely to alarm both the Pakistani government and China, which is a close of ally of Pakistan and has considerable investment in its south Asian neighbour.

The Chinese woman was shot on Tuesday in a market in the northwestern city of Peshawar along with a Pakistani man. Police at the time said they did not know the motive.

“Our comrades carried out the attack in Peshawar which killed the Chinese tourist,” Mohammed Afridi, a spokesman for a faction of the Pakistani Taliban from the Darra Adam Khel area, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

“This was revenge for the Chinese government killing our Muslim brothers in their Xinjiang province.”

In recent years there have been a number of violent incidents between Uighurs and Hans in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China. Most recently, a riot in Yecheng, Xinjiang left up to 20 dead. Read more about Uighurs and Xinjiang via CDT.

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Post tags: crime, Pakistan, Taliban, terrorism, Uighurs, Xinjiang
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The fighting took place in Yecheng, a Silk Road oasis town that is about 150 miles from the border with Pakistan. Although details are only slowly emerging, and even then in a contradictory fashion, it appears that police might have been the target.

“Nine terrorists suddenly ran up to innocent people and began stabbing them, which resulted in 13 deaths and many injuries,” reported Tianshannet, a website run by the local government. “Local policemen acted immediately, arrested two and shot seven violent terrorists on the spot.”

The attack took place on Xinfu Road, a busy thoroughfare near the county seat.

The death toll is the highest since a spate of riots last summer in Kasghar and Hotan, two larger cities to the north and south, respectively, of Yecheng.

Al Jazeera has further details on the attackers and victims:

The regional government did not identify any of the attackers or give their ethnicity. Nor did it identify the ethnicity of their victims.

However, on Wednesday a local police officer, who gave only his surname Tuo, told the AFP news agency: “At around …. 6:00pm [local time; 10:00 GMT] around a dozen rioters carrying axes appeared in the market, in an area that is mostly populated by Han people.

“Most of the victims were Han people, but some were Uighurs.”

The vast region, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan, is home to around nine million Uighurs who complain of oppression under Chinese rule. The number of Han, China’s dominant ethnic group, living in the region has increased dramatically over the last decade.

Exiled Uighur activists say that the violence was sparked by escalating tensions as police crack down on Uighur residents in the area. From the LA Times report:

Dilxadi Rexiti, a spokesman in Sweden for the World Uighur Congress, an exile group, said that seven of those killed were police officers. He said there had been tensions between the police and local Uighurs because of a 100-day campaign to round up criminals that started in late December.

“The police were given quotas and got awards for arresting people. They were arresting Uighurs for no reason and that was aggravating the tensions,” Rexiti said.

Roads around Yecheng were patrolled with checkpoints and more than 80 Uighur men were reported to have been arrested.

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No details were given about what might have set off the violence, although Xinjiang see periodic outbreaks of anti-government violence by restless members of the region’s native Turkish Muslim Uighur ethnic group.

The Xinhua News Agency said rioters armed with knives attacked victims in Yecheng county outside the city starting overnight. They killed 10 people and police shot and killed two assailants, the report said.

Xinhua said police were chasing others involved in the attacks but did not say how many suspects there were.

The report could not be independently confirmed. Chinese authorities maintain tight control over information and the circumstances surrounding such incidents are often murky.

Reports of violence in the region are not new, as there have been persistent reports of outbreaks of violence. The Guardian adds:

Censors have begun blocking internet searches for Yecheng and Kashgar. Searches for both Yecheng county and Kashgar on the news service Sina’s Weibo microblog brought only a message saying results could not be shown due to regulations.

Microbloggers have often been quick to spread eye-witness accounts of disasters, accidents and other politically-sensitive events.

Almost 200 people died, mostly thought to be from China’s majority Han Chinese ethnic group, and 1,700 were injured when riots erupted in Urumqi in July 2009. Fighting broke out between Uighurs and migrant Han workers and buses were overturned and set on fire. Vicious assaults on Han were followed by revenge attacks on Uighurs.

Southern Xinjiang saw three outbreaks of violence in July 2011, according to state media. A group of Uighurs was said to have stormed a police station in Hotan, taking hostages and killing four. On 30 and 31 July, another Uighur group in Kashgar hijacked a truck, set a restaurant on fire and stabbed people in the street, state media reported. Chinese authorities say police shot 14 attackers in Hotan and five in Kashgar, but exile groups have disputed those accounts.

Although there are no official reports about what triggered the violence, there is speculation that the most recent riot was a result of allegations of discrimination and marginalization of Uighurs. China also has claimed that it faces the threat of organized terror by radical Muslim groups in Xinjiang.

Read more about Xinjiang protests via CDT.

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Mr. Guo, who told the authorities he comes from the far west region of Xinjiang, set off from coastal Fujian Province on a flotation device made from bamboo and Styrofoam. Mr. Pu said officials had been tracking his progress by radar.

After his arrest, he told Taiwanese reporters that he was inspired to make the perilous journey by Taiwan’s presidential race, which pits the incumbent Ma Ying-jeou against two opponents. “I want to see your elections, with campaign flags flying all over the place,” he said.

The elections, which take place Jan. 14, have piqued considerable interest in China, which is led by a Communist government keen to dampen the democratic yearnings of its people. After decades of authoritarian rule, Taiwan — considered by Beijing to be a breakaway province — held its first direct presidential elections in 1996.

Taiwan held its first of three presidential debates last week as it prepares to go to the polls in January 2012, with candidates playing it safe with regards to the question of reunification or independence and focusing mostly on economic issues instead. See also additional CDT coverage of cross-Strait relations.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cross-Strait relations, democracy, elections, Fujian, Taiwan independence, unification, Xinjiang
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