Xinjiang
Xinjiang state security officials questioned and beat Tong Qimiao, a Protestant businessman, on September 28 and on October 1 threatened to revoke his business license, according to September 30 and October 3 reports of the China Aid Association (CAA), a U.S.-based NGO that monitors the religious freedom of Chinese Protestants. State security officials beat Tong so seriously that he could not walk; his wife sent him to a hospital in Kashgar, where tests showed that a bone in his chest was broken. State security officials visited him in the hospital, showed him the September 30 press release of the China Aid Association, and demanded that he state in writing that officials had not beaten him, threatening to revoke his business license if he refused.
The government of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region has approved the establishment of a legal aid center in the city of Urumqi and in each of the six counties that the city administers, according to an October 21 Urumqi Evening News report. All of the centers will begin operation by the end of 2005. To date, defendants in 574 criminal, 226 civil, and 16 notarization cases have received legal aid in Urumqi.
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region's Discipline and Inspection Committee (Committee) issued a public statement on October 20 condemning "false reporting" about Xinjiang government efforts to force officials and state-owned enterprise managers to divest and disclose their illegal holdings in coal mines (CECC coverage of one such report is available here).
Vice Premier Huang Ju attended an October 15 ceremony in Lhasa marking the completion of track laying for the Qinghai-Tibet railroad, Xinhua reported the same day. President Hu Jintao sent a letter congratulating railroad workers, saying that the railroad would speed regional economic and social development and "strengthen solidarity of various ethnic groups." The railroad "involves an investment" of 33 billion yuan, China Daily reported on October 15, and will "attract tourists, traders and ethnic Chinese settlers" to the region. The journey from Beijing to Lhasa will take two days.
Xinjiang police confiscated the passports of a group of Uighur pilgrims seeking to cross the border by bus at Qonjirap in Xinjiang on August 25, according to the East Turkistan Information Center (in Uighur). The group had planned to spend the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in Mecca.
The Xinjiang Education Department is requiring nearly 100,000 students to pick cotton and hops in the People's Liberation Army's Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps farms as part of a mandatory work study program, according to a September 12 Urumqi Evening News report. In an unusually frank report on popular dissatisfaction with a government program, the Urumqi-based Metropolitan Consumer News published an article on September 15 entitled "How Much Is Amiss in the Work Study Program." The article quoted several parents who had called the newspaper's hotline to complain that schools were forcing young children to work 12 hour shifts in the fields, exceeding the government's two-week maximum limit on how long students may work, cramming students into overcrowded makeshift dormitories, and feeding them poorly and irregularly.
The government of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region has spent over 40 million yuan since 2001 on its Fourth Five-Year Work Program for Popularizing the Law, the Xinjiang Legal Development Net reported on September 26. As part of the work program, in 2001 the Xinjiang government's Law and Politics Office began sending legal experts and educators to counties throughout the region to conduct seminars on how best to increase adherence to the law by juveniles. The teams have conducted 216 seminars in 13 prefectures and 62 counties, reaching an audience of 360,000 middle school students, teachers, and parents, according to the report. In another of the programs, some 300,000 government officials have participated in yearly legal examinations since 2002.
Officials in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region who have financial interests in coal industries and mines have not divested themselves of these holdings, despite a State Council directive to do so, according to an October 14 Xinjiang Daily report. The State Council had issued a Circular on August 24 ordering all government and Party officials and state-owned enterprise managers throughout China to disclose and divest all of their financial holdings in coal industries and mines (other than shares purchased in the public stock exchange) by September 22.
Minorities are still underrepresented in Xinjiang's party and government leadership, according to a series of reports on the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC) Web site. The reports were intended to highlight the progress of minorities since the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region was founded on October 1, 1955, but often give the opposite impression. A report entitled "Xinjiang's Hetian Prefecture Rigorously Trains and Promotes Minority Cadres", for example, notes that the Hetian Prefecture Party Personnel Office promoted 28 "outstanding minorities" to the post of township director, 368 to posts as deputy Party secretary or deputy government head at the township level, and two to deputy director positions at the county level. Minorities account for 65 percent of the prefecture's "township leadership ranks," according to the report.
The government of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region has increased efforts to control the "three forces" of separatism, terrorism, and religious extremism, according to an announcement by Wang Lequan, the Xinjiang Communist Party General Secretary, at an August 26 press conference. The Chinese domestic press covered Wang's remarks widely (see 1, 2 and 3).