Recently in Uyghur minority group Category
By REUTERS | The New York Times
September 20, 2009
Taiwan's second-largest city said Sunday it would show a film about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer further angering China which is still fuming about the Dalai Lama's recent visit to the island.
The documentary, The 10 Conditions of Love, will screen four times Tuesday and Wednesday ahead of an annual film festival in Kaohsiung, a southern Taiwan port city whose mayor Chen Chu is backed by Taiwan's anti-China opposition party.
"To draw the curtains over this controversy as soon as possible, the film will be screened ahead of schedule," the city said in a statement.
Chinese officials say that Kadeer, a former businesswoman who now leads exile group the World Uyghur Congress, orchestrated ethnic violence in July in Xinjiang, a largely ethnic Uighur region of northwest China, killing about 200 people.
She denies the allegation.
China's state-run television said the government agency in charge of Taiwan affairs denounced the decision to show the film, which it said distorted the truth and sent the wrong message on terrorism.
"We urge Kaohsiung not to cling to this reckless decision and disrupt cross strait relations," the television said in a report quoting the Taiwan Affairs Office.
China has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since 1949, when Mao Zedong's forces won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to the island. But the two sides have worked since mid-2008 to improve relations.
A furore erupted in Australia earlier this year when Chinese embassy staff pressed unsuccessfully for the same documentary to be removed from the country's biggest film festival in Melbourne, prompting an angry public backlash and higher audience numbers.
Kaohsiung and several opposition-led Taiwan counties irked Beijing this month when they invited the Dalai Lama to pray for victims of typhoon Morakot, which killed up to 770 people, mostly in mudslides.
Beijing sees the Tibetan spiritual leader as a separatist.
(Reporting by Ralph Jennings in Taipei and Kirby Chien in Beijing; Editing by Ron Popeski)
By Dikki Sinn - Associated Press writer | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News Philippines
September 13, 2009
Hundreds of Hong Kong journalists, lawmakers and residents marched Sunday to protest the alleged police beatings of three reporters covering recent unrest in western China and demanded a government investigation.
Demonstrators wearing black rallied outside a police station before marching to local offices of China's central government.
"This time the authorities are over the line," Mak Yin-ting, chairwoman of the Hong Kong Journalist Association, told the gathering. "They did not only beat reporters, but blamed them for inciting the public disorder."
Organizers put the crowd at about 700 people. Police did not immediately provide estimates.
The TV journalists were covering the aftermath of a mass protest by Han Chinese in the troubled city of Urumqi earlier this month after a series of attacks with syringe needles that China's government blames on Muslim separatists.
The three, who worked for TVB and Now TV news outlets in Hong Kong, said they were kicked, punched, and shoved to the ground by police before being detained for about three hours.
By Saad Al-Ghamdi | Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia) | via ArabNews (Saudi Arabia)
August 16, 2009
Millions of Uighur Muslims in China's Xinjiang province have been the victims of persecution and exile or execution simply because they demand a dignified recognition of their religious, cultural and ethnic rights and identity. In their unwavering resistance to government suppression, the Uighurs are only armed with their faith in their religion and heritage. They tenaciously cling to their Turkic ethnicity and use the Arabic script to write their language.
Exiled Rebiya Kadeer, a 60-year-old mother of 11, is in the forefront of the struggle of the downtrodden Uighurs. While admitting her Chinese nationality, Kadeer is not willing to give up her ethnic and religious identity for the dominant Han culture in China.
According to a statement by an official of Amnesty International last year, "Few people around the world would know what's happening to the Uighurs if it weren't for a 59-year-old mother of 11 children who served as a representative in the National People's Congress, Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer."
This former member of the Political Consultative Congress and China's delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women has become a big embarrassment to the Chinese government. She has exposed to the world the large-scale human rights violations practiced by the Chinese provincial and central governments.
Since the age of 14, despite poverty and poor health, she has been worried about the humiliating existence of the Uighurs and has worked to regain their lost freedom and dignity. She had to work as a laundress in order to feed her family as her husband's work did not suffice for the family.
Although her first marriage eventually broke up, with hard work and determination she became a successful businesswoman and once she was even ranked as the seventh wealthiest business personality in China. She has also spent a lot of time doing charitable work in order to aid her people.
She hoped to work within the Chinese system and improve the downtrodden Uighurs. It was while looking for an ally in her service to the people that a likeminded Uighur activist, Saddiq Razi, was released from jail after nine years of punishment. She visited him and offered to marry him with a proposal to struggle jointly for the cause of Uighurs. Surprised by the wealthy woman's proposal, he asked her why she wanted to marry an ex-convict like him, her reply was, "For the sake of Uighurs. I want us to be together in the struggle for Uighurs."
Razi married her though his colleagues initially suspected her of being a government's agent.
Impressed by Kadeer's philanthropic efforts, the provincial and central governments nominated her to the Political Consultative Congress in 1992, and appointed her a member of China's delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Such positions never distracted her from demanding a dignified life for her people.
Using her influence in Beijing, Kadeer tried to persuade high ranking Chinese officials to change their repressive policies against Uighurs. Her insistence on real autonomous authority for the people and especially her harsh criticism of the government's human right violations during a National People's Political Consultative Conference session in 1997 prompted the government to turn against her.
She was arrested in 1999 and then sentenced to eight years in jail.
Kadeer's case became an international embarrassment for the Chinese government after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch publicized her case and worked for her freedom. After her release on medical grounds, she toured the world, actively campaigning for the rights of the Uighur people.
Lately, the Chinese government has reportedly been extorting confessions from the people in Urumqi and other places that Kadeer incited them to riot and rebel against the government so that she could be arrested again on fabricated charges which might even warrant her execution. Even before the July riots in Urumqi, the Chinese authorities had tortured her sons and other relatives for forced confessions against her. Despite the government's intimidating pressures and the torture of her own children, that fragile woman from the remote Uighur region remains unwavering in her stand.
By BBC World News
July 29, 2009
The visit of exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer to Japan has provoked a storm of criticism in China's press, with commentators warning that it will be seen as a hostile act towards Beijing.
China accuses Mrs Kadeer, the leader of the US-based Uighur World Congress, of inciting violent clashes in China's Xinjiang province between the Muslim Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese in early July.
There is also anger in the mainland Chinese press about the decision by an Australian film festival to invite Mrs Kadeer to appear at the event.
Beyond China, meanwhile, Beijing's attempt to use its diplomatic muscle to prevent countries from hosting the Uighur dissident has earned it accusations of "bullying" and "thuggishness".
'Extremely unfriendly'
Writing in China's official English-language China Daily, commentator Jin Canrong says that Japan's decision to grant Kadeer a visa represents an "extremely unfriendly" move.
In a dig at the political troubles of embattled Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, an editorial in Beijing-based Huanqiu Shibao says the invitation is "obviously not unrelated to the current political chaos in Japan", and concluded that "1.3 billion Chinese can only have contempt towards [the people of Japan]".
The Japanese authorities are using Kadeer to "vilify" China in order to maintain Japan's pre-eminent status in Asia, says a special report in Hong Kong-based news agency Zhongguo Tongxun She.
An editorial in the Beijing-backed Hong Kong daily Wen Wei Po says this "seriously unfriendly act" has exposed Japan's double standards towards "violent terrorist forces".
An unattributed commentary in Hong Kong's Oriental Daily News accuses the Japanese government of "taking advantage" of China's ethnic problems to undermine the country's stability.
"Malicious provocation"
An editorial in mainland China's Huanqiu Shibao focuses its anger on Australia's invitation to Kadeer to attend a screening in Melbourne of a documentary about her life, "10 Conditions of Love", condemning it as a "malicious provocation".
Two Chinese film directors, Jia Zhangke and Zhao Liang, withdrew their films from the festival in protest. Writing in Guangzhou's Nanfang Ribao, Bi Wenzhang is moved to "heartily admire and applaud this ... act of patriotism".
Chen Shan, of the Beijing Film Academy, also praises the directors' "patriotic protest" in the English-language China Daily.
Lan Xi, writing in Huanqiu, suggests that the Australian government should not do "foolish things that harm the overall situation of Sino-Australian relations".
'PR disaster'
Elsewhere, China's tough approach to Mrs Kadeer's visits to Japan and Australia is perceived as heavy-handed.
Chinese authorities have "learned nothing" from their experience of dealing with the Dalai Lama, says the editorial in Taiwan's Taipei Times.
The campaign against Kadeer is a comparable "public relations disaster", serving only to underscore China's "thuggishness" and alienate it further from the human rights agendas of Western countries, the daily says.
China has "miscalculated the extent of its reach" by seeking to have the documentary on Kadeer pulled from the festival's programme, Christopher Scanlon in Australia's Melbourne-based daily The Age says.
Its efforts have succeeded only in providing the film with "an avalanche of publicity", he adds.
In the same newspaper, Bruce Jacobs contends that the Chinese government was behind the two Chinese filmmakers' withdrawal from the festival.
He says that the move represents part of a concerted "bullying" campaign by Beijing, arguing the objections of the Chinese authorities "need to be faced down" because "you don't give in to bullies".
By Brian Womack - Bloomberg.com
21 July 2009
The Chinese government restricted access to more social-networking sites in the past few days, escalating a clampdown that started about six months ago, said Xia Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project.
The sites that are inaccessible or aren't working properly include Fanfou, Digu, Zuosa and Jiwai, said Qiang, who is an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley in California. Those sites work like Twitter, allowing users to post information quickly before editors can review their submissions, Qiang said.
"It turns out one of the very interesting functions of those sites is the news and opinions is getting circulated very quickly," Qiang said. That makes it much harder for authorities to keep control, he said.
Internet users in China had difficulty logging on to Facebook and other social-networking sites earlier this month following ethnic clashes in western China that left more than 150 people dead. Access to Google Inc.'s YouTube, a video- sharing site, and the Twitter messaging service also has been limited.
When accessed from San Francisco, the Digu and Zuosa Web sites said they were closed for maintenance today, according to postings on their home pages. Fanfou wasn't available as of 11 a.m. San Francisco time. The Web site of Jiwai appeared to be working.
Bing, Twitter
Twitter and Microsoft Corp.'s new Bing.com search engine were inaccessible in Beijing in June, around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Facebook, the most visited social-networking site, continues to receive reports of users having problems accessing the site in China, Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, said today.
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