Xinjiang

Government Pledges Crackdown

On March 7, XUAR government chairperson Nur Bekri announced that the "three forces" had "recently become more active in planning violent activities," according to a China Daily paraphrasing of his remarks in a March 8 article. "We should stay on high alert all the time to crush any attempt to damage Xinjiang's development and stability," he said. At a March 9 press conference for domestic and foreign reporters, XUAR Communist Party Chair Wang Lequan said that authorities would "destroy" groups plotting to disrupt the Olympics, according to a transcript of the event posted March 10 on Tianshan Net. At the same press conference, Nur Bekri described the government's policy of making preemptive strikes against separatists and maintaining a posture of "striking hard with high pressure."

A new program in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) strengthens government measures to promote Mandarin Chinese at the preschool level via educational instruction that the government describes as "bilingual" but that places primacy on Mandarin at the expense of ethnic minority languages. According to a February 28 article from the Urumqi Evening News (via Tianshan Net), authorities in the XUAR implemented a program in February to send student-teachers from the Xinjiang Preschool Teacher's College to preschools in Kashgar prefecture to supplement the area's shortage of bilingual teaching staff.

Authorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) will make "illegal" political and religious publications the focal point of their campaign to "Sweep Away Pornography and Strike Down Illegal Publications," according to a January 18 report from Xinhua. Li Yi, head of the XUAR Propaganda Bureau, made the announcement at a January 17 conference at which he stressed the importance of censoring illegal publications and taking actions such as eliminating pornography and removing "harmful information" from the Internet to ensure reforms develop in a stable manner and to promote a "sound cultural environment." He described the situation regarding "illegal" religious and political publications as "severe," and called for enforcement agencies to maintain vigilance against such publications.

Editor Korash Huseyin completed his three-year prison sentence for "dereliction of duty" on February 2 and is presumed to have since been released from prison, according to information from the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) Political Prisoner Database. Radio Free Asia's Uighur service, which reported on the sentence's expiration in a February 1 article, reported that Chinese authorities have not provided confirmation of the release. Huseyin had served as chief editor of the Kashgar Literature Journal, based in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which published a short story in 2004 deemed to promote separatism.

A year after China's Regulations on Reporting Activities in China by Foreign Journalists During the Beijing Olympic Games and the Preparatory Period went into effect, a Beijing-based association of foreign journalists noted "improved overall reporting conditions for foreign journalists" but also "hot spots where journalists have experienced repeated violations" of the regulations, according to a January 1 Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) press release. The temporary regulations, effective from January 1, 2007 to October 17, 2008, give foreign journalists greater freedom to report in China, something the International Olympic Committee required China do in order to host the 2008 Olympics.

Local governments and educational institutions in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) continued in 2007 to impose religious restrictions on Muslims' observance of the holiday of Ramadan. Local governments and schools called for increased controls over religious activities during Ramadan, banning students from fasting, forbidding teachers and other state employees from engaging in religious activities, and requiring local restaurants to remain open during the holiday.

Authorities in western China have closed four businesses owned or headed by local and overseas Christians, reflecting their concerns over perceived instability and "foreign infiltration" from overseas religious groups. According to a series of reports published by the U.S.-based nongovernmental organization China Aid Association (CAA), in September, authorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) shut down two businesses owned or headed by local Protestants, accusing both businesses of conducting illegal religious activities. Officials accused one business of "seriously endanger[ing] the security of the state and social and political security" by "illegally preaching Christianity" among ethnic Uighurs in the region.

Ma said that lack of fluency in Mandarin Chinese could make it "difficult for [ethnic minority students] to continue their education," but he did not acknowledge how the XUAR government's own educational programs foster this problem by reducing opportunities for instruction in minority languages. Under Chinese law, ethnic minorities have the right to use and develop their own languages, but the XUAR government has placed increasing emphasis on Mandarin in recent years. The government promotes the use of Mandarin through bilingual programs and other measures that place primacy on using Mandarin in school rather than ethnic minority languages. This drive has spread to the pre-school level.