Posts tagged ‘Xinjiang’

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22/01/2014

China urges respect for ethnic traditions in restive Xinjiang | Reuters

Ethnic traditions in Xinjiang must be respected, the top official in the restive far western region of China said, despite criticism that government policies there unfairly target the Muslim Uighur ethnic community.

Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Zhang Chunxian delivers a speech during a tea forum celebrating the Corban Festival in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, November 5, 2011. REUTERS/China Daily

The government must implement \”ethnic unity education and propaganda\” among all communities, especially among the region\’s youth, the ruling Communist Party\’s Xinjiang chief Zhang Chunxian said in comments carried in state media on Wednesday.

\” must treat issues of local tradition with respect and resolve issues of violence with rule of law and severe measures,\” the official Xinjiang Daily cited Zhang as saying.

China has intensified a sweeping security crackdown in Xinjiang, further repressing Uighur culture, religious tradition and language, rights groups say, despite strong government assertions that it offers Uighurs wide-ranging freedoms.

In November, officials demanded that lawyers in Turpan, an oasis city southeast of the regional capital, Urumqi, commit to guaranteeing that relatives do not wear burqas, veils or participate in illegal religious activities, and that young men do not grow long beards.

Many Uighurs resent local policies imposed by the government and an inflow of Han Chinese migrants, and some Uighur groups are campaigning for an independent homeland for their people.

Experts say China\’s repression of religious practices has pushed some Uighurs to more strongly embrace Islamic traditions.

Zhang\’s pledge follows state media reports in early January that President Xi Jinping was shifting the region\’s focus to maintaining stability over development, after a series of attacks last year fuelled by what the government said was religious extremism.

\” must acknowledge the long-term, acute and complex nature of the anti-separatism and violent terrorism fight,\” Zhang said, adding that there was no contradiction between stability and development.

via China urges respect for ethnic traditions in restive Xinjiang | Reuters.

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30/12/2013

BBC News – China police kill eight in Xinjiang clash

Police in China\’s restive Xinjiang region have shot dead eight people during a violent clash on Monday, a state news portal says.

Map

The clash broke out when men armed with knives and explosives attacked a police station in Yarkand county, officials say. One person has also been arrested.

The violence comes two weeks after a riot in the region, which saw 16 people killed, including two police.

Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uighur minority group, sees sporadic clashes.

The government traditionally blames extremists for the violence. Uighur activists, on the other hand, point to ethnic tensions and tight Chinese control as triggers for violence.

 

Verifying reports from the region is difficult because the information flow out of Xinjiang is tightly controlled.

News of the latest clash first emerged on the state-run regional Tianshan news portal.

Officials described the people who attacked the police station in Yarkand, near the old silk road city of Kashgar, as \”thugs carrying knives and throwing explosives\”.

It was not immediately clear if there were any police casualties. The incident is currently under investigation, officials say.

More than 100 people have been killed in Xinjiang this year in this and similar incidents, which Beijing blames on separatist \”terrorists\” from the Uighur group, says the BBC\’s John Sudworth in Shanghai.

via BBC News – China police kill eight in Xinjiang clash.

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01/12/2013

Xinjiang college says approved political views needed to graduate | Reuters

College students in China\’s restive western Xinjiang region will not graduate unless their political views are approved, a university official said, as the country wages what school administrators called an ideological war against separatism.

A Uighur student attends a lesson at the Xinjiang College of Uighur Medicine in Hotan in the southwestern part of China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region September 15, 2003. REUTERS/Andrew Wong

Xinjiang is home to the Muslim Uighur ethnic group, many of whom resent controls imposed by Beijing and an inflow of Han Chinese migrants. Some Uighur groups are campaigning for an independent homeland for their people.

University officials from Xinjiang said their institutions were a frontline in a \”life and death struggle\” for the people\’s hearts and a main front in the battle against separatism, the ruling Communist Party\’s official newspaper in the region, the Xinjiang Daily, reported on Tuesday.

\”Students whose political qualifications are not up to par must absolutely not graduate, even if their professional course work is excellent,\” said Xu Yuanzhi, the party secretary at Kashgar Teachers College in southern Xinjiang, which has been an epicenter for ethnic unrest.

It is unclear if such a policy has been officially implemented throughout the region.

\”Ideology is a battlefield without gun smoke,\” Xinjiang Normal University President Weili Balati said.

\”As university leaders, we have the responsibility to do more to help students and teachers properly understand and treat religion, ethnicity and culture and help them distinguish between right and wrong,\” he said.

China blamed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) for an attack on October 28, when a vehicle ploughed through bystanders on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and burst into flames, killing three people in the car and two bystanders.

Uighur exiles, rights groups and some experts have cast doubt on the official accounts of what China has deemed terror attacks and foreign reporting of the incident has discussed whether it was motivated by punitive ethnic policies.

An Islamist militant group has released a speech claiming responsibility for the incident, which China\’s Foreign Ministry said should silence those who are skeptical about the threat of terror within China\’s borders.

The Uighurs are culturally closer to ethnic groups across central Asia and Turkey than the Han Chinese who make up the vast majority of China\’s population.

via Xinjiang college says approved political views needed to graduate | Reuters.

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24/11/2013

Between a desert and a dry place: Beijing’s green projects drain scarce water resources | South China Morning Post

Smog-plagued Beijing is anxiously awaiting its first batch of synthetic natural gas – a material converted from coal and piped 300 kilometres from Heshigten Banner in northeastern Inner Mongolia.

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The gas will power some of Beijing\’s central heating systems in the harsh winter months, replacing coal to cut harmful emissions of particulate pollutants.

When the pipes are fully pumping next year, Beijing will receive 4 billion cubic metres of synthetic gas a year – nearly half of last year\’s natural gas consumption – a step towards switching all the city\’s heating systems and industrial boilers from coal to gas.

But there is an ominous tinge to the seemingly green investment: environmental experts say the water-intensive conversion process could drain already scarce water resources in the country\’s drylands in the northwest, eroding land and causing more sandstorms.

\”If water depletion continues … not only will the local people suffer, the environmental impact could be profound,\” Chinese Academy of Sciences ecology researcher Xie Yan says.

Nationwide, replacing dirty coal with cleaner natural gas is a key measure in reducing the choking smog that spreads over more than a quarter of the country and is inhaled by nearly 600 million people. Because of the country\’s limited conventional natural gas and abundant coal reserves, converting coal to natural gas seems a convenient choice.

Beijing\’s demand for natural gas is expected to rise rapidly, reaching 18 billion tonnes in 2015 and 28 billion tonnes in 2020, as all its heating systems and industrial boilers make the switch from coal to gas. Beijing Gas Group, which is fully owned by the municipal government, has invested in the coal-to-gas project in Inner Mongolia to meet the demand.

The coal-to-gas industry, which had been sputtering for several years, received a boost in September when the State Council released a national action plan to fight air pollution, giving the sector explicit support.

But ecological experts have voiced concern for the unintended environmental consequence of coal-to-gas plants. The conversion requires vast quantities of water not just for production, but also for cooling and the removal of contaminants. On average, one cubic metre of synthetic natural gas needs six to 10 tonnes of freshwater.

\”Freshwater is a key raw material for turning coal to gas, so it\’s impossible to reduce water demand in such projects,\” Wen Hua, an associate at the US-based World Resources Institute (WRI), says.

To make things worse, the coal-abundant northwest, where the gas projects are based, already experiences chronic water shortages. Five provinces – Shanxi , Shaanxi , Ningxia , Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang – which possess 76 per cent of the country\’s coal reserves, have just 6.14 per cent of its total water resources.

via Between a desert and a dry place: Beijing’s green projects drain scarce water resources | South China Morning Post.

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11/11/2013

High-speed railways: Faster than a speeding bullet | The Economist

China’s new rail network, already the world’s longest, will soon stretch considerably farther

THE new high-speed railway line to Urumqi climbs hundreds of metres onto the Tibetan plateau before slicing past the valley where the Dalai Lama was born. It climbs to oxygen-starved altitudes and then descends to the edge of the Gobi desert for a final sprint of several hundred windblown kilometres across a Martian landscape. The line will reach higher than any other bullet-train track in the world and extend what is already by far the world’s longest high-speed rail network by nearly one-fifth compared with its current length. The challenge will be explaining why this particular stretch is necessary.

Record-breaking milestones have become routine in the breathtaking development of high-speed railways in China, known as gaotie. In just five years, since the first one connected Beijing with the nearby port of Tianjin in 2008, high-speed track in service has reached 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles), more than in all of Europe. The network has expanded to link more than 100 cities. In December the last section was opened on the world’s longest gaotie line, stretching 2,400km from Beijing to Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong (see map). The network has confounded some sceptics who believed there would not be enough demand. High-speed trains carry almost 2m people daily, which is about one-third of the total number of rail passengers.

 

Most of China’s gaotie construction has focused on the country’s densely populated east and centre. The Beijing-Shenzhen line, which is due to be extended into Hong Kong by 2015, links half a dozen provinces and 28 cities. In 2009 work began on the section that will connect the north-west of the country, a line that could hardly be more different from those that criss-cross the booming east. It stretches 1,776km from Lanzhou, the capital of the western province of Gansu, to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, an “autonomous region” bordering on Central Asia. Officials put the cost at 144 billion yuan ($24 billion); cheap perhaps compared with the 400-billion-yuan line from Beijing to Shenzhen, but it traverses such a vast stretch of barely inhabited terrain that land and rehousing costs are negligible.

Officials have given the project the ponderous name of the Lanxin Railway Second Double-Tracked Line. This is to distinguish it from a conventional line from Lanzhou to Xinjiang (the first syllables of which form the name Lanxin) that was completed in 1962. Oddly, however, it does not follow the same route. Instead of heading north from Lanzhou along the old Silk Road through Gansu, it detours into adjacent Qinghai province on the Tibetan plateau and opts for a far tougher route through the snowy Qilian Mountains before re-entering Gansu 480km later and picking up the old trail into Xinjiang.

via High-speed railways: Faster than a speeding bullet | The Economist.

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04/11/2013

In China’s Xinjiang, poverty, exclusion are greater threat than Islam | Reuters

If the analysis in this report is correct, then it is good news for China and Xinjiang. Alleviating poverty is difficult, but far easier than eliminating religious extremism.

“In the dirty backstreets of the Uighur old quarter of Xinjiang\’s capital Urumqi in China\’s far west, Abuduwahapu frowns when asked what he thinks is the root cause of the region\’s festering problem with violence and unrest.

A police officer stops a car to check for identifications at a checkpoint near Lukqun town, in Xinjiang province in this October 30, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/Files

\”The Han Chinese don\’t have faith, and the Uighurs do. So they don\’t really understand each other,\” he said, referring to the Muslim religion the Turkic-speaking Uighur people follow, in contrast to the official atheism of the ruling Communist Party.

But for the teenage bread delivery boy, it\’s not Islam that\’s driving people to commit acts of violence, such as last week\’s deadly car crash in Beijing\’s Tiananmen Square – blamed by the government on Uighur Islamist extremists who want independence.

\”Some people there support independence and some do not. Mostly, those who support it are unsatisfied because they are poor,\” said Abuduwahapu, who came to Urumqi two years ago from the heavily Uighur old Silk Road city of Kashgar in Xinjiang\’s southwest, near the Pakistani and Afghan border.

\”The Han are afraid of Uighers. They are afraid if we had guns, we would kill them,\” he said, standing next to piles of smoldering garbage on plots of land where buildings have been demolished.

China\’s claims that it is fighting an Islamist insurgency in energy-rich Xinjiang – a vast area of deserts, mountains and forests geographically located in central Asia – are not new.”

via In China’s Xinjiang, poverty, exclusion are greater threat than Islam | Reuters.

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03/11/2013

Jurassic parks rise in east as China catches dinosaur fever | The Times

National pride, an epic drive for museum construction and an unprecedented number of holes in the ground mean that the global future of dinosaur hunting will be Chinese.

Chinese archeologist uncovering dinosaur fossils at a site in Zhucheng, known as “dinosaur city,” in northeast China’s Shandong province. Archaeologists in China have uncovered more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints, believed to be more than 100 million years old, state media reported on February 7, 2010, in an area said to be the world’s largest grouping of fossilised bones belonging to the ancient animals, after a three-month excavation at a gully in Zhucheng

The Chinese enthusiasm for palaeontology and regional one-upmanship, played out with 150 million year-old skeletons, could have a dramatic effect on the dinosaur names learnt and loved by children around the world.

China’s rich subterranean reserves of dinosaur fossils have already produced the Tsintaosaurus and Shantungosaurus, named decades ago after the places in which they were found. More recent additions include the Zhuchengtyrannus (from Zhucheng) and the Huanghetitan liujiaxiagensis, the latter named after a reservoir.

In many cases, discoveries of new species in China have prompted a fundamental rethink about dinosaur biology, their evolution and the way they were dispersed around the world. Discoveries in eastern China of thousands of fossilised eggs and embryos brought new theories about how dinosaurs grew; the world’s largest “graveyard” of dinosaurs in Shandong province offered the intriguing insight that dinosaurs of different species shared nests.

With Chinese funding increasingly available to domestic and international teams, the next two decades could see the familiar pantheon of Tyrannosaurus rex, Diplodocus and Triceratops joined by herds of newly discovered species named in honour of obscure corners of China where local governments are eagerly financing dinosaur digs. Only last month, a study in Shanxi province near the Yungang grottoes announced the discovery of a new hadrosaurid dinosaur from the late Cretaceous period: Yunganglong datongensis. It was greeted with huge excitement, because it could throw light on how a whole class of dinosaurs, the Hadrosauridae, evolved. New Chinese names have an element of whimsy: in April this year, international researchers agreed that a fossil found in the remote western Xinjiang region in 2006 was a 161 million year-old meat-eating theropod. It was named Auron Zhaoi after the dragon king in China’s most famous folk tale.

Although it has been clear for nearly a century that China is fabulously blessed with fossils, domestic interest has historically been limited, said Xu Xing, the senior professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. However, the past decade has seen a surge of interest that has corresponded with China’s protracted economic boom.

“When I started, there was just one person applying to study palaeontology — me. Now this institute alone has intakes of 20 students a year and there are new institutes opening around the country,” Professor Xu said. Local governments from Inner Mongolia to Hunan were competing to build museums around dinosaurs found on their patches and financing digs that might make a name for them, he added. Huang Dong, curator of the new £10 million Heyuan Dinosaur Museum in Guangdong province, said that it receives around 120,000 visitors a year. A further £40 million of investment in a dinosaur park is planned.

via Jurassic parks rise in east as China catches dinosaur fever | The Times.

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01/11/2013

Tiananmen crash ‘incited by Islamists’ – BBC News

China\’s top security official says a deadly crash in Beijing\’s Tiananmen Square was incited by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

The crash occurred on Monday when a car ploughed into a crowd then burst into flames, killing three people inside the vehicle and two tourists.

Police have arrested five suspects, all from the western region of Xinjiang, home to minority Uighur Muslims.

Security has also been tightened in Xinjiang, which borders Central Asia.

China often blames the ETIM group for incidents in Xinjiang. But the BBC correspondent in Beijing says few believe that the group has any capacity to carry out any serious acts of terror in China.

Uighur groups claim China uses ETIM as an excuse to justify repressive security in Xinjiang.

via BBC News – Tiananmen crash ‘incited by Islamists’.

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14/09/2013

Holding back the sands of time

China Daily: “Desert dwellers are slowly reclaiming cultivatable land, as Cui Jia and Mao Weihua report from Hotan, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Holding back the sands of time

Hotan prefecture in the southwest of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region is famous for two things: jade and sand. The locals still try to pluck the precious stones from the dry bed of the Yurungkash River, also known as the White Jade River, but the rising value of jade means the place has almost been picked clean after repeated treasure hunts, so the chances of making new discoveries are slim. However, in this area bordering the Taklimakan, the world’s second-largest desert, the sand will never disappear.

Almost every one in Hotan lives close to the more than 300 oases, large and small, that are dotted around the southern edge of the Taklimakan. Those enclosed by the desert only account for 3.7 percent of Hotan’s total area. As a result, people have to cope with windborne sand for more than 260 days a year. On a bad day, they have to be prepared to seek cover from sandstorms, which can blacken the sky within minutes and without warning. In addition to the health problems posed by the storms, sand carried at high speed can erode buildings and strip the paintwork from vehicles.

A new artificial greenbelt in Hotan county in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Photos by Mao Weihua / China Daily

In Hotan, the transition between oases, fed by the floodwater from northern Hotan’s Kunlun Mountains, and the desert is almost instantaneous. One minute the scenery along the road is pure yellow desert and the next, tall poplar trees on both sides of the road suddenly begin to provide comfortable shade from the searing heat.

“At the current rate, the prefecture has been losing 33 square kilometers of oases every year, due to the invasion of the Taklimakan and the construction of infrastructure. Meanwhile, the local population is booming, so we have no choice but to create about 66 sq km of oases every year,” said Chen Baojun, Party chief of the prefecture’s forestry bureau, who has 20 years experience in desertification control.

He said the sand from the Taklimakan can be carried as far away as Beijing and sometimes even as far as Japan, meaning control of desertification in Hotan has both a national and international resonance.

Qira county was once a kingdom on the ancient Silk Road in the days of the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220). The county seat has relocated north three times because the sands have eaten up the cultivatable land. The first relocation occurred more than 2,000 years ago and the most recent about 620 years ago.

In the 1980s, the county seat faced yet another relocation because the desert was only about 1.5 km away. Many locals were forced to move because their houses were buried under sand, often overnight.

It was at that point that the government stepped in to provide measures against desertification. In the days before the measures, the locals tried to prevent the sand from encroaching on their homes by erecting fences around the houses, said Chen.”

via Holding back the sands of time[1]|chinadaily.com.cn.

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15/07/2013

Apple Investigates China iPhone Death Allegations

WSJ: “Apple Inc. AAPL -0.20% said Monday that it is investigating a case in which the family of a 23-year-old woman alleges that she was electrocuted by her iPhone.

Though details about the case remain sketchy, it has caught the imagination of social media users in China, who have been spreading word about the case and warning not to use devices while they are charging.

According to a report in China’s official state-run Xinhua news agency, relatives of the woman in China’s western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region are alleging the woman died after trying to answer a call while her iPhone was charging. An officer with the local Public Security Bureau said Monday that an “elementary inspection” showed the woman, named Ma Ailun, was electrocuted.

“Her neck had an obvious electronic injury,” he told China Real Time.

Beyond that, though, the official said that the case was still under investigation, and there were no more details available about whether her smartphone, the charger, or something else killed the woman.

In its statement, Apple said: “We are deeply saddened to learn of this tragic incident and offer our condolences to the Ma family. We will fully investigate and cooperate with authorities in this matter.””

via Apple Investigates China iPhone Death Allegations – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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