Uighur activism: A lone voice silenced – China signals its alarm at rising dissent in Xinjiang by jailing an academic for life
The Economist, 27 September 2014
ON SEPTEMBER 23rd Ilham Tohti, a scholar who has been an outspoken critic of the government’s treatment of people of his Uighur ethnicity, was sentenced to life in prison for separatism. The ruling by a court in Urumqi, the capital of his native region of Xinjiang, was the harshest known sentence in years for someone convicted of a non-violent political crime in China. By jailing Mr Tohti, who says he supports Chinese rule, the government has signalled a desire to silence even moderate voices of dissent in Xinjiang, where Uighur separatists have often resorted to violence to express their grievances.
Mr Tohti (pictured in court) has long been the highest-profile champion in China of Uighur rights. No other Uighur inside the country has come close to speaking out on such issues with his persistence. But the government, though unsettled by his pro-Uighur sentiments, has for a long time also worried about how to handle him: he taught economics at a prestigious university in Beijing that was established precisely to win over ethnic minorities like China’s Uighurs. Arresting such a calmly spoken academic risked fuelling even more sympathy abroad for the plight of Uighurs, most of whom are Muslims and many of whom chafe at China’s rule in Xinjiang.
Much has changed recently. A series of violent incidents involving Uighurs has unnerved the government. These include acts of terrorism both in Xinjiang, the homeland of 10m Uighurs, and in other parts of China. Although crude in nature, these attacks are said by the government to be part of an increasingly organised separatist movement with links to jihadists outside China. In October 2013, three months before Mr Tohti was detained in Beijing, terrorist violence struck in the capital. A car slammed into a security barrier near Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square and exploded into flames, killing six people, including three Uighurs inside the vehicle.
As he had done many times before, Mr Tohti gave interviews to foreign media after the Beijing attack in which he criticised China’s ethnic policies. Mr Tohti had long expected to get into trouble for his outspokenness; this time he did. The charge of separatism required little more than Mr Tohti’s own (far from separatist) words to convict him, says Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group. “The test for separatism is criticism of ethnic policies, because ethnic policies are correct and if you criticise them it can only be because you want to wreck them and create chaos,” he explains.
The court’s verdict against Mr Tohti, who has always advocated non-violence, said he had “bewitched and coerced young ethnic students” into writing separatist tracts for Uighur Online, a website he founded late in 2005. (As many as seven of Mr Tohti’s students who have written for or helped with the website are believed to be in custody.) The court said Mr Tohti had “encouraged his fellow Uighurs to use violence”, including during ethnic clashes in Urumqi in July 2009 that left around 200 dead.
Mr Tohti has said he merely wants better treatment for Uighurs and more autonomy for Xinjiang (which is officially named as a “Uighur autonomous region”). The Chinese government has invested heavily in Xinjiang, including in oil and gas extraction. But critics note that many of the best jobs for these projects have gone to ethnic Han Chinese. They also say the government has intensified its controls on Islam in Xinjiang.
The imprisonment of Mr Tohti, and the confiscation of all his assets, are part of a broader crackdown on activists, intellectuals and lawyers since Xi Jinping became China’s leader in late 2012. In Xinjiang it has long been the case that trials relating to “state security”, as those involving separatism are described, are often conducted in secret. The publicity given to Mr Tohti’s case is therefore unusual. The authorities have allowed their crackdown to be associated with the plight of an internationally recognised individual. Barack Obama was among Western leaders who called for his release. Wang Lixiong, a dissident writer in Beijing, tweeted after Mr Tohti’s sentencing that the authorities had made him a “Uighur Mandela”. Xinhua, the government’s news agency, scoffed at the comparison and accused Western countries of using Mr Tohti as their “pawn to pile political pressure on China”.
Mr Tohti himself had long expected this day to come. In a video interview conducted in November 2009 he talked of being prepared for a long term in prison, or even a death sentence. “That just might be the price our people have to pay,” he said.