Chinese government

The Xinjiang factor

Sa, 01/28/2014 - 12:26 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
Tohti has been held incommunicado since January 15; (top) Guzailai Nu'er, his wife, gives an interview to Reuters on a phone from the window of her house in Beijing. Photo: Reuters

IN AN ominous sign of the fate awaiting one of China’s best-known Uighur intellectuals, security officials in the far western region of Xinjiang issued a statement on January 25, accusing him of separatism and inciting ethnic hatred. The statement provides the first concrete indication that the scholar, Ilham Tohti, an economics professor in Beijing, could face a long prison term for his advocacy on behalf of Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslim minority whose uneasy coexistence with the Chinese authorities has grown increasingly violent.

New Method of Repression in Xinjiang? Shoot first. "Anti-Terrorism" Second

Sa, 01/28/2014 - 12:22 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
Photo: NTD Television

Chinese authorities defined multiple explosions on Friday in Xinjiang Aksu as a so-called "violence and horror" case. Six people were shot and five people arrested including two ladies; another six people died in the explosion. Commentators said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a new method to suppress the rebels. They shoot Uyghurs continuously and frame them as terrorists.

China's Wild West The Problem With Beijing's Xinjiang Policy

Pt, 01/27/2014 - 11:30 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
Chinese military police ride past a Uighur woman on main street in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, July 2009. (Nir Elias / Courtesy Reuters)

Last October, a sport-utility vehicle sped onto a crowded Beijing sidewalk and exploded at the foot of Tiananmen gate, killing five people and injuring nearly 40 others. In the aftermath of the attack, the Chinese government declared the explosion an act of terrorism committed by Islamic jihadists from western China. Meanwhile, the foreign media turned the spotlight on the home province of the attackers -- China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region -- where some nine million Turkic-speaking Muslims, known as Uighurs, have lived under the control of the Chinese Communist Party since 1950. This arrangement has not been altogether peaceful; just this week, for example, local police gunned down six people in the city of Xinhe.

Historical Narratives and Uyghur Marginalization in China’s Development of Xinjiang

Per, 01/16/2014 - 14:56 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
Uyghur Men

The bleak outlook for Uyghurs hoping to succeed in this Han dominated system has led to increased tension drawn upon ethnic lines. Protests against the Han influx became increasingly violent during the 1990s in response to the CCP’s tightening grip on Xinjiang’s administration. Although protests decreased in the early 2000s, the riots of 2009 were a bloody wake-up call to the worsening state of Uyghur-Han relations. The Chinese government, however, blamed these acts of violence not on state policy but on the encouragement of international agitators such as Rabiya Qadir, the leader of the World Uyghur Congress. The government labels all Uyghur violence as “terrorist acts” as a way to associate Uyghur separatism with global Islamic extremism and point the blame to causes external to Xinjiang’s domestic situation.

Uyghur Activist ‘Very Weak’ in Prison, Denied Family Visits

Cu, 12/27/2013 - 21:15 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
Abduweli Ayup (R) with his wife and daughter while studying in the U.S. in 2010. Photo courtesy of the family via RFA

A Uyghur blogger and activist is “seriously ill” in prison in China’s troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang following his detention four months ago, according to concerned family members who have been barred by the authorities from meeting with him.The Chinese authorities have also refused to inform the family of the whereabouts of Abduweli Ayup, a 39-year-old active promoter of the Uyghur language, since he was arrested in August for allegedly illegally collecting donations to run Uyghur schools in Xinjiang.

Land-Grab Farmers in Xinjiang Held For Speaking to 'Hostile' Media

Cu, 12/27/2013 - 16:14 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
Government slogans along a highway in the Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County in Xinjiang's Ili prefecture encouraging people to be profit-oriented. Photo: RFA

Authorities in the northwestern region of Xinjiang have detained and interrogated several farmers on suspicion of revealing state secrets and speaking to "hostile" media organizations, relatives said this week. The detentions came after local farming communities, who include ethnic minority Kazakhs, Uyghurs and Xibe, as well as migrant Han Chinese farmers, protested the canceling of their 30-year and 50-year land leases by officials in the Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County in Xinjiang's Ili prefecture. "They summoned my husband to the police station [where] I heard the police officer say that someone had called up Radio Free Asia," the wife of farmer Shen Zhihe told RFA's Mandarin Service. She said Shen was detained in a raid by armed police nearly a week ago, alongside several other outspoken farmers in the county who are fighting the loss of 12,000 hectares (120 square kilometers) of farmland which they invested in as part of a western development program begun in the late 1990s.

Beijing Hits Out Amid Criticism on Human Rights

Sa, 12/10/2013 - 16:49 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
A dozen petitioners facing repatriation exit a van outside a government complex in Beijing, Dec. 9, 2013. Photo courtesy of petitioners

Beijing officials on Tuesday hit out at international concern over its human rights situation, saying that only the Chinese people have the right to speak out on the subject. But police in the Chinese capital swooped on the thousands of petitioners who arrived in the Chinese capital to pursue complaints against the ruling Chinese Communist Party ahead of Human Rights Day on Tuesday. "There are tens of thousands of petitioners lurking in Beijing," retired People's Liberation Army (PLA) officer Gao Hongyi told RFA's Mandarin Service.Gao, who hails from the eastern port city of Qingdao, said he and dozens of other former PLA officers planned to converge on the United Nations representative offices in Beijing's embassy district on Tuesday. Thousands of petitioners thronged the alleyway outside the complaints offices of the central government, Supreme People's Court and National People's Congress on Tuesday, on a street dubbed by petitioners the "Dead End Alley of the Three Cheats."

It's as clear as day - China needs its own Clean Air Act

Pt, 12/09/2013 - 11:37 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
It's as clear as day - China needs its own Clean Air Act

Last week, a pleased Shanghai doctor who performed a successful cataract operation gingerly led his patient to the window for him to see the city's skyline for the first time, but instead of a delightful cry, the patient batted his eyelids several times and began to shout at the doctor for botching the job. That is one of the dozens of jokes flying around the country's social media as Shanghai and more than 100 other major mainland cities were enveloped in the choking and hazardous smog last week. Visibility in some eastern cities was reduced to less than 50 metres and to less than five metres in the worst hit places, where PM2.5 concentrations hit 500 micrograms per cubic metre. The World Health Organisation's recommended level for the pollutant is 25mcg per cubic metre.

Protesting Mongolian herders expelled from Beijing

Pt, 12/09/2013 - 11:26 -- Anonymous (doğrulanmamış)
17 herders from Urad Middle Banner in front of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing in November 2013 (SMHRIC photo)

On November 30, 2013, 17 Mongolian herders from western Southern (Inner) Mongolia’s Urad Middle Banner (“wu la te zhong qi” in Chinese) were expelled from Beijing. They had spent the previous 12 days submitting appeals to Central Government authorities, attempting to solicit support from the Chinese State Council Letter and Visitation Bureau and the Ministry of Agriculture to restrain local government officials and Chinese miners from illegally occupying their grazing lands. Dispatches from the local Urad Middle Banner government and the Public Security authorities carried out the expulsion of the protesting herders from Beijing. The herders are currently confined to their communities and barred from communications with higher government authorities. According to written communications received by the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC), the herders are protesting: 1. illegal land expropriation and land sale by local government officials to the Chinese; 2. destruction of the herders’ grazing land by Chinese miners and military bases; 3. the government’s failure to provide adequate redress and compensation to the affected herders.

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