Ethnic Minority Rights
The Xinjiang government will hold open examinations for 700 civil service positions, according to Tianshan Net, a website jointly managed by Xinjiang’s Propaganda Department and the People’s Daily. 500 of these positions will go to ethnic Han Chinese, while ethnic nationalities, which make up over 60 percent of the region’s total population, will fill the remainder. Examinees with the highest scores will go to southern Xinjiang to serve for six-year terms in county and village-level government positions. Uighurs make up more than 95 percent of the population in southern Xinjiang. The government also said that it will not assign successful examinees to their hometowns.
Jin Shixun, Deputy Director of the Tibet Development and Reform Commission, announced April 6 that the government plans to open a copper mine tapping China's largest proven reserve near Yulong township in Jiangda (Jomda) county in the northeastern tip of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). The location of the mine in Yulong township has proven reserves of 6.5 million tons, according to a Xinhua report on April 7, 2005. Deputy Director Jin said that construction is scheduled to commence in September 2005, with production starting within three years.
China’s State Council issued a white paper on February 28, 2005, entitled "Regional Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities in China," that highlights the progress the Chinese government has made in minority nationality areas.
Divided into five sections, the report outlines why regional autonomy is necessary in China, describes the process of establishing autonomous governments, and lists the rights these territories hold. The white paper also describes the preferential policies that the central government has adopted to promote development in minority regions, and lists the primary achievements of the regional autonomy policy over the last 50 years.
The South Central Nationalities University in Hubei province opened a new legal aid center on March 21. The Center will serve both students and the broader community, providing counsel on minority and labor rights cases, public interest litigation, and administrative litigation suits.
The South Central Nationalities University is one of thirteen institutions of higher learning designed specifically to train minority students.
Nankai University in Tianjin recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Lanzhou Cypress Alley Educational Center for At Risk Students, agreeing to send a group of college volunteers each year to work with the Center’s young minority students. A report announcing the agreement stresses that in addition to helping youngsters in the classroom, the volunteers will show patriotic movies and host other patriotic study sessions to strengthen the minority students’ sense of patriotism, unity, and socialism.
Appealing to rights provided in both national and international law, an Inner Mongolian tribe has halted, at least temporarily, the construction of a new Han Chinese-owned Genghis Khan theme park. The project would replace the traditional Genghis Khan Mausoleum overseen by the Darhad tribe since 1696. In an open letter presented to the local government this fall, a group of Darhad Mongols appealed to rights provided in the 1984 Regional Autonomy Law, United Nations regulations on the protection of cultural relics, copyright laws, and the PRC’s land law to bar the promoter from taking over the mausoleum.
According to a State Council White Paper on Regional Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities in China released on February 28, the Chinese government plans to enroll 2,500 students from ethnic minority areas in MA and PhD programs during 2005. The plan calls for adding another 2,500 in 2006, to bring the total to 15,000.
The State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the Finance Ministry’s decision to expand the "Flourishing Borders, Prosperous Nationalities" campaign launched in 2000 was recently elected one of the 2004 Top Ten News Stories on Minority Nationalities by a committee comprising State Ethnic Affairs Commission officials, representatives from several major journals on minority issues, academics, and central news agencies. The central government launched the "Flourishing Borders, Prosperous Nationalities" campaign in conjunction with the better known "Great Western Development" campaign of 1999, and Chinese leadership has hailed it as a cornerstone of "the new era of minority policy."
CECC Summary
A January 26 Xinhua report said that the Higher People’s Court of Sichuan province has commuted to life imprisonment a death sentence imposed on Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche (A'an Zhaxi), a popular Tibetan religious leader. The original sentence had been subject to a two-year reprieve, which expired January 26. The Court’s announcement came exactly two years after the same court upheld Tenzin Deleg’s conviction on appeal. According to the decision, "The court commuted [the] death penalty on A'an Zhaxi to [a] life term because he did not intentionally violate the relevant law specifications again during the execution period of the past two-year reprieve."
According to the Assoicated Press (AP), Chinese government sources have confirmed the outbreak of ethnic rioting between Chinese Muslims (Hui) and Han Chinese in the central Chinese province of Henan over the past few days. Accounts differ as to the causes of the rioting, which appear to have originated as small-scale disputes between a few individuals which escalated as larger groups of Han and Hui took sides in the conflict. According to the AP, official reports place the number of deaths at seven, and confirm the imposition of martial law in the areas wracked by rioting. Government accounts as to total deaths differ from those provide by a New York Times report, which placed the total deaths at 150, including police forces sent in to maintain order. No coverage of these developments has been observed in the Chinese media.