Xinjiang
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.
Armed police will no longer guard the government office compound in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, according to a China Youth Daily report on April 1. The Xinjiang government will also remove the walls surrounding the compound in an effort to "build a transparent government" in the autonomous region, where the Muslim minority populations are subject to strict government controls and monitoring and often complain that officials exclude them from the decisionmaking process.
Foreign Ministry press spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters at a March 29 press briefing that the Chinese government has been "closely following the development of the situation in Kyrgyzstan" since protestors overthrew former President Askar Akayev on March 24. China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and Kyrgyzstan share a 682-mile border; ethnic Uighurs, Kyrgyz and other minorities live on both sides of the frontier. Chinese security officials closed the border with Kyrgyzstan between March 23 and 28 as a result of the violence and unsettled political conditions in Bishkek and elsewhere in the Central Asian republic.
A Catholic priest in the Xinjiang city of Ghulja (Yining in Chinese) told the Norway-based Forum 18 News Service that government authorities in Xinjiang do not allow minors to attend church services. This information apparently contradicts Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao’s recent statement that "China has no laws prohibiting minors from believing in religion." According to the Ghulja-based priest, police checkpoints at churches prevent minors from attending services; a schoolteacher beat one boy who managed to attend Christmas Mass; and managers at state-owned enterprises threaten to sack employees who attend church.
The United Nations Development Programme recently announced that it is working with the governments of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to promote increased regional trade and tourism, create better transportation networks, improve informational exchanges, and develop policy regulations. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will help coordinate the two-year, million dollar, "Silk Road Area Development" program.
According to a March 1 report in the Urumqi Evening News, police patrolmen in Urumqi have been issued new pistols and submachine guns, and new anti-terror programs have been added to their training schedules. Previously, police carried only police batons, tear gas grenades, and self-protection gear. The report says that "police patrolmen in Urumqi have never in the history of the city been so fully equipped."
The government of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region reported February 21 that it is "vigorously applying for funds" to implement a plan to protect nine wetland reserves and implement 20 wetland reclamation projects. The Xinjiang Net article reports that overpopulation, agricultural policy, and the overuse of water resources have cut the total land area of Xinjiang’s wetlands in half since the early 1950s, leaving only 1.48 million hectares today. Xinjiang authorities will announce in early spring a more inclusive 30-year plan to protect all the region’s wetlands, despite the central PRC government not yet having approved funding for the 2004-2010 Wetlands Project.
The Xinjiang Statistical Bureau recently announced that the economic disparities between northern and southern Xinjiang decreased in 2004. According to the 2002 Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook, more than 95 percent of southern Xinjiang’s population is non-Han and the average per capita income is half the provincial average. Northern Xinjiang has a larger concentration of Han Chinese (73 percent of Urumqi’s population is Han, for example) and is Xinjiang’s industrial base. The industrial growth rate in southern Xinjiang from January to September 2004 was the highest in the region’s history, the announcement said. Growth rates were particularly high in Kashgar (65.9 percent), Kezhou (54.6 percent), and Hetian (23.5 percent), outpacing northern Xinjiang rates by more than 10 percent. Capital investment was more than 36 percent higher in southern Xinjiang than in the north.
Beginning in 2005, Xinjiang authorities will assign "outstanding" county and city-level party secretaries and mayors to head a variety of smaller departmental offices throughout Xinjiang. In addition, government officials will assign a select corps of provincial-level party and state leaders to senior positions at the prefectural, county, and city levels.
Radio Free Asia reports that an agricultural official in the Xinjiang regional government confirmed the existence of a system of forced labor called "hasha" in remote areas of the countryside, in which laborers are not paid for their work. The report quoted the official as saying: "In the other provinces in China where there has been rapid economic development, hasha was phased out long ago . . . [b]ut here in Xinjiang, we still need it."
One Uighur man described his experience with hasha to RFA as follows: "For one month out of every year for three years we were forced to open up land that had never been settled before—it was just wilderness. We were also forced to build houses for Han Chinese immigrants who were resettling in the area."