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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In his report on the bill to the legislature, Vice Minister of Public Security Yang Huanning said the lack of clear definitions under current law have had direct, adverse effects on China’s effort to fight terrorism and bring terrorism-related assets under control, as well as to participate in international cooperation in this regard.

In the draft bill, terrorist acts are defined as those acts which are intended to induce public fear or to coerce state organs or international organizations by means of violence, sabotage, threats or other tactics.

The Beijing government has equated protests in Xinjiang and Tibet with terrorism, and this legal change is seen as an effort to bring terrorist suspects under legal charges. BBC adds:

Proponents of the new draft bill say it should make it easier to bring terrorism charges.

But critics say it is the Chinese government’s economic policies and restrictions on cultural and religious expression which are fostering anger among Xinjiang locals.

Last week, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that the Dalai Lama’s prayers for the nine Tibetans who had self-immolated in Sichuan were in fact, “terrorism in disguise.”

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Post tags: terrorism, Xinjiang, Xinjiang violence
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Police detained the 27-year-old woman passenger after she threatened to detonate a bomb during the China United Airlines flight from Beijing to Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, Xinhua reported.

The plane, which was carrying 160 passengers and 10 crew and made an emergency landing at Gansu’s Jiayuguan Airport, left again six hours later after no explosives were found.

“A woman threatened the plane staff, saying ‘many people will die, there is TNT on the plane’,” Xinhua quoted the Jiayuguan head of public security, Chang Shaoyuan, as saying.

The woman, surnamed Wang and from the southwest mega-city of Chongqing, told police she had a problem with her boyfriend and was flying to Xinjiang to talk to him, the report said.

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Post tags: crime, terrorism, Xinjiang
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There’s word from the World Health Organization that wild poliovirus type 1 has appeared in 10 children in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region of China this month.

The viral strains isolated from these children were genetically linked to virus currently circulating in Pakistan, the WHO says.

They’re the first confirmed cases of polio identified in China since 1999, according to WHO.

It’s still unknown whether the virus was carried out of Pakistan into China, or whether a Chinese visitor to Pakistan carried the virus back home. Pakistan is one of only four countries still reporting polio, with 84 cases this year — up from 48 last year. The other three countries are Nigeria, India and Afghanistan.

British authorities are recommending that any travelers to the Xianjian Uygur region of China get a polio booster dose if they haven’t had one in the past 10 years.

Currently the polio outbreaks are in Hotan and Bazhou of Xinjiang province, but WHO authorities warn that the virus could spread beyond affected areas. From CNN:

The disease, a contagious viral illness that in its most severe form causes paralysis, difficulty breathing and sometimes death, broke out in the prefectures of Hotan and Bazhou in the country’s western Xinjiang province.

Among the ten cases confirmed, six are in children under three years old and four are young adults.

The WHO said evidence indicates the virus is genetically linked to polio cases currently circulating in Pakistan, which borders Xinjiang. Pakistan has been affected by the nationwide transmission of the same WPV1 strain.

“Although other areas in China or other countries are not immediately at risk due to the geographic distance to the affected province, the polio virus can travel great distances and find susceptible populations, no matter where they live,” Helen Yu, from the WHO’s Beijing office told CNN.

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Post tags: polio, world health organization, Xinjiang
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The convictions were the first for the scores of people detained after a series of violent outbursts in Kashgar and Hotan, two Silk Road outposts whose largely Uighur populations have long had a contentious relationship with Chinese rule.

The condemned men, all of them Uighurs, were convicted of homicide, leading a terror group, manufacturing illegal explosives, arson and “other crimes.” A report in the state-run Xinjiang Legal Daily said the trials, which took place on Tuesday in Kashgar and Hotan, were “open and fully protected the suspects’ legal rights.”

Uighur exile groups, however, said the defendants were tortured into giving confessions and denied adequate legal representation. “This was not a fair legal process by any means,” said Dolkun Isa, secretary general of the World Uyghur Congress, an advocacy group in Germany. “These sentences are political decisions, not legal ones.”

The Communist Party has long struggled to quell ethnic tensions in Xinjiang, a vast area of desert and snow-capped peaks prized for its oil and gas reserves, but also as a strategic buffer against Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and other South and Central Asian nations.

Last week, a little-known organization claimed responsibility for the attacks, but their involvement was not confirmed in media reports. Also from the New York Times:

The American organization, the SITE Intelligence Group, posted the video, by the Turkistan Islamic Party, on its Web site on Wednesday, reporting that it had been issued in late August. In the video, according to SITE, the group’s leader, Abdul Shakoor Damla, claimed that attacks in July in Hotan and Kashgar, two southern Xinjiang cities, were acts of revenge for the Chinese government’s repression of the region’s ethnic Uighur population.

The Turkistan Islamic Party has previously made similar claims that remain unverified. Its highest-profile threat, to disrupt the 2008 Beijing Olympics with chemical, biological or conventional weapons, was never carried out.

Some terrorism experts remain concerned about the group’s threats, and its members have been linked to other Islamic militants, including Al Qaeda. But one Chinese analyst, Zhao Guojun of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, was cautious in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Read more about the attacks in Xinjiang via CDT.

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Post tags: Uighurs, violence, Xinjiang
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Getting this pre-eminent riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other co-operative institutional mechanisms has proved unsuccessful so far in any basin. Instead, the construction of upstream dams on international rivers such as the Mekong, Brahmaputra or Amur shows China is increasingly bent on unilateral actions, impervious to the concerns of downstream nations ….

The consequences of such frenetic construction are already clear. First, China is in water disputes with almost all its neighbours, from Russia and India to weak client-states such as North Korea and Burma. Second, its new focus on water mega-projects in the homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered tensions over displacement and submergence at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been wracked by protests against Chinese rule. Third, the projects threaten to replicate in international rivers the degradation haunting China’s internal rivers.

The Financial Times has also reviewed Chellaney’s book, ‘Water: Asia’s New Battleground‘, alongside two others on China’s rise and its international context. Chellaney regards Indian recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet as a strategic error in terms of water security, warning that strong diplomacy is vital to avoiding conflict over water resources in the future.

For details of Chinese proposals to dam upstream of the Indian border (which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied are part of official plans), see Chinese Engineers Eye Tibetan Rivers.

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Post tags: Afghanistan, Burma, dams, India, Inner Mongolia, North Korea, Russia, south-to-north water diversion project, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Vietnam, water crisis, water resource, Xinjiang
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Bloomberg, and more recently The Washington Post, have run stories about the visa problems of scholars who contributed to Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, a volume edited by Frederick Starr and published by M.E. Sharpe in 2004. The Bloomberg piece was exhaustively reported; the reporters who wrote it, Dan Golden and Oliver Staley, conducted interviews with Chinese as well as western participants in the episode, and all in all did a good job with a complicated story.

Inevitably, however, the Bloomberg piece creates some misconceptions, and these are as likely to be reinforced as cleared up in news reports that build on it, as the Washington Post story of last weekend shows. Now seems the time both to correct the problematic aspects of the Bloomberg piece and also to discuss lessons we may take away from the entire episode. There are a couple of key issues involved. Of special importance to scholars of China: are you in danger of being banned for what you write? My answer below will be, “not really.” And for universities, grant agencies and other institutions involved in academic exchanges with China, the episode raises the question of what you should do in the face of official Chinese interference in curriculum, research, guest lectures or other academic matters. I will suggest that a strong and collective response, organized by institutions and not left to the affected scholars themselves, is imperative. The reason for such a response is not simply to help individual scholars get visas, but to make the point that academic exchange must be unhampered and reciprocal and to set the right tone for future academic interchange with China.

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Post tags: academic freedom, foreigners in China, Xinjiang
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The academics have taken to calling themselves the Xin­jiang 13 to emphasize their shared misfortune. Seven years ago, they assembled a book about Xinjiang, a vast region of western China that has a large Muslim population and an occasionally violent separatist movement.

They say their book triggered a backlash from the Chinese government because of its sensitive topic. Contributors have repeatedly been refused visas, thwarted from returning to the region that is the focus of their careers.

“It took us a couple of years to figure out that all 13 of us were banned,” said Dru Gladney, an anthropology professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., who contributed two chapters on politics to the 2004 book. “And now China is taking off, and we can’t go. It’s devastating.”

The authors of “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland” said in recent interviews that the diplomatic impasse is the broadest attack on academic freedom since the United States established diplomatic relations with Communist-led China in 1979.

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Post tags: academic freedom, foreigners in China, Xinjiang
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The government has blamed Muslim extremists for the July attacks and violent protests in Kashgar, where 80 percent of the population of 600,000 are Uighurs, and in another southern Xinjiang city, Hotan.

Recently it sent its elite Snow Leopard Commando unit to patrol the region from a base in Aksu city, roughly halfway between Kashgar and the regional capital of Urumqi, the China Daily said, quoting a spokesman for the Xinjiang People’s Armed Police.

Calls to the Xinjiang government and police were not answered Saturday.

The Snow Leopards, formed in 2002, were charged with securing the 2008 Beijing Olympics and have a mandate to combat terrorism, control riots, dispose of bombs, respond to hijackings and carry out other special tasks, the newspaper said.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: public security, terrorism, Xinjiang
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They call themselves the “Xinjiang 13.” They have been denied permission to enter China, prohibited from flying on a Chinese airline and pressured to adopt China- friendly views. To return to China, two wrote statements disavowing support for the independence movement in Xinjiang province.

They aren’t exiled Chinese dissidents. They are American scholars from universities, such as Georgetown and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have suffered a backlash from China unprecedented in academia since diplomatic relations resumed in 1979. Their offense was co-writing “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland,” a 484-page paperback published in 2004 ….

Colleges employing the Xinjiang scholars took no collective action, and most were reluctant to press Chinese authorities about individual cases. Dartmouth almost fired Rudelson because he couldn’t go to China, he and Rieser said.

“As a group, most of us have been very disappointed in the colleges’ and universities’ lack of sympathy and support,” said Dru Gladney, an anthropology professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who described himself and his American co-authors as the “Xinjiang 13.” Colleges are “so eager to jump on the China bandwagon, they put financial interests ahead of academic freedom.”

See also past posts on Xinjiang and academic freedom at CDT.

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Post tags: academic freedom, academics, Dru Gladney, universities, Xinjiang
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