Xinjiang
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government and the region’s Communist Party Committee convened a meeting on elementary and middle school bilingual education on December 4, according to a Xinjiang City News report posted December 5 on the Tianshan Net Web site. Ismail Tiliwaldi, Chairman of the XUAR government, stressed the importance of bilingual education in fostering the economic and social development of minority groups. He outlined two approaches for improving bilingual competency among ethnic minorities: strengthening skills from childhood through bilingual pre-school education, and raising the quality of the teaching staff in the XUAR. Tiliwaldi called for better bilingual skills among pre-school students by combining ethnic minority students with Han students in schools that place primacy on instruction in Mandarin Chinese.
A court in Kashgar city, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), has sentenced Korash Huseyin, the senior editor of the Kashgar Literature Journal, to three years imprisonment for publishing a short story in late 2004 that Chinese authorities allege "incites ethnic splittism," according to a November 11 Radio Free Asia report. Nurmemet Yasin, the author, is already serving a prison sentence; the Kashgar Intermediate People's Court sentenced him in February to 10 years imprisonment for "inciting splittism." Both Huseyin and Yasin are members of the Uighur ethnic group.
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The Congressional-Executive Commission on China held another in its series of staff-led Issues Roundtables, entitled "China's Changing Strategic Concerns: The Impact on Human Rights in Xinjiang" on Wednesday, November 16, from 10:00 - 11:30 AM in Room 480 of the Ford House Office Building.
November 3, 2005 - Revised by the 30th Standing Committee Meeting of the 9th Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region People's Congress on 20 September 2002 in accordance with the "Decision to Revise the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Regulation on Minority Language Work"
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). According to the statement, some reporters in Xinjiang "did not go through normal channels to gather information, and instead relied on rumors and fanciful reasoning" to publish a "series of false articles." The statement refers to an October 20 China Youth Daily article that noted some Xinjiang government officials would prefer to lose their jobs than forfeit their financial holdings in coal mines, and condemns the article as "pure fabrication . . . with a harmful impact on society."
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.