Zhao Ziyang’s Secret Memoirs

Book’s editors on lifting a veil from Chinese politics

By Katie Koch, BU Today, Dec 2, 2009

Bao Pu (left) and Adi Ignatius, editors of Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, say the former leader’s memoir is the first to emerge from the highest ranks of China’s Communist Party. Photos by Vernon Doucette

Secrecy has long been the calling card of China’s Communist Party. When important leaders retire, unlike their Western counterparts, they choose silence over the attention and danger of a tell-all memoir.

Until now. The first behind-the-scenes look at China’s political power struggles in the turbulent 1980s has emerged, the secret memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the fallen party chief who spent the last 16 years of his life under house arrest.

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China: Uighur Detainees ‘Disappeared’ After Xinjiang Protests

Chines Government Should Account for Every Detainee

Human Rights Watch, October 20, 2009

Uighur women grieve for men who they claim were taken away by Chinese auhtorities after the July 5-7, 2009 protests in Urumqi, China on July 7, 2009.

© 2009 AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

Ku Huakua, a 25-year-old Han Chinese vegetable vendor was killed by a Uighur mob on the night of July 5th. His mother shows his photos in their home after returning from identifying his body. Urumqi, July 7, 2009.

© 2009 Alan Chin

Related Materials:

“We Are Afraid to Even Look for Them”

China: Xinjiang Trials Deny Justice

Behind the Violence in Xinjiang

The Chinese government says it respects the rule of law, but nothing could undermine this claim more than taking people from their homes or off the street and ‘disappearing’ them.

Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch

(New York) – The Chinese government should immediately account for all detainees in its custody and allow independent investigations into the July 2009 protests in Urumqi and their aftermath, Human Rights Watch said in a new report on enforced “disappearances” released today.

The 44-page report, “‘We Are Afraid to Even Look for Them’: Enforced Disappearances in the Wake of Xinjiang’s Protests,” documents the enforced disappearances of 43 Uighur men and teenage boys who were detained by Chinese security forces in the wake of the protests.

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UN rights chief says China failing to protect Tibetan, Uighur rights

TibetanReview.net, Sep17, 2009

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Navanethem (Navi) Pillay, has cited “discrimination and the failure to protect minority rights” among the factors that had led to the recent violent events in Chinese ruled Eastern Turkestan and Tibet. Pillay made the comment in an “update report” to the 12th session of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), Geneva, on Sep 15 morning. She called lack of democracy a major factor contributing to rights violations.

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Pioneering human rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong faces trial in China

Xu Zhiyong became famous when he took up the cause of Sun Zhigang, a student who died in a detention centre in 2003

• Tania Branigan in Beijing and agencies
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 August 2009 20.36 BST

Xu Zhiyong is a co-founder of Gongmeng, a legal group which has dealt with some high-profile human rights cases. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP

Chinese authorities have formally arrested a pioneering lawyer, more than two weeks after security officials took him from his home at dawn. His lawyer warned today that he was likely to face a trial.

Xu Zhiyong, 36, is one of the best-known human rights lawyers in the country and co-founder of Gongmeng, a legal group that has dealt with some of the most sensitive cases in recent years. He is accused of tax evasion and, if found guilty, could face up to seven years in prison.

“It’s not an indictment. But in the usual run of things, I expect the procuratorate will take the case to court, and the court is very unlikely to reject their case,” Xu’s lawyer, Li Fangping, told Reuters.

Amnesty International alleged in a statement: “The charges of tax evasion are a simple ploy to shut down the Open Constitution Initiative [Gongmeng].”

It added that Zhuang Lu, a staff member detained at the same time as Xu, had also been arrested.

Gongmeng has taken on high-profile cases, including the parents of children made ill by tainted baby milk formula, and issued a report criticising the handling of unrest across the Tibetan plateau.

Xu’s arrest comes amid a broader crackdown on activist lawyers, in which more than 50 have lost their licences to practise, and the curbing of other dissent in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of Communist party rule in October this year.

China carries out mass arrests in Xinjiang

By John Chan, wsws.com, August 11, 2009

The Chinese government is tightening its grip in the northwestern Uighur region of Xinjiang. On July 29, 253 people were arrested over their alleged involvement in the July 5 riot in Urumqi, the provincial capital. On August 2, an additional 319 were arrested.

The police had previously reported that over 1,400 had been detained shortly after the protest. Authorities claim that 197 people, mainly Han Chinese civilians, died at the hands of Uighur rioters, and 1,700 people were injured.

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The Urumchi Unrest Revisited

The violence in Xinjiang took place almost a month ago, but it continues to generate interesting commentary (see, for example, this thoughtful essay by Pallavi Aiyar). The early July events have also recently had two reverberations in Australia, as Jia Zhangke and two other Chinese filmmakers pulled out of a Melbourne film festival where a documentary expected to present a sympathetic view of one of the people Beijing blames for the unrest was to be shown, and then hackers attacked the festival’s website to protest that film’s inclusion in the line-up. In light of this, we asked James Millward, a leading specialist in the history of Xinjiang who has written about related issues for us before, to share with the readers of China Beat his take on what happened in early July and how it should be understood.

By James Millward | The China Beat, July 29, 2009

The ugly mob violence that roiled the western Chinese city of Urumchi in Xinjiang on July 5th was rather quickly suppressed, and Urumchi is now quiet. Thanks to an unprecedented degree of openness to the international press, moreover, we have a better idea specifically what happened than we have for other such incidents in China.

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10,000 Uighurs disappeared during unrest in China, exiled leader claims

Rebiya Kadeer says undercover snatch squads targeted Uighurs during Urumqi clashes

• Justin McCurry in Tokyo
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 July 2009 12.38 BST

Rebiya Kadeer, head of the World Uighur Congress, gives a press conference in Japan. Photograph: Junji Kurokawa/AP

Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uighur leader, today claimed that almost 10,000 Uighurs had “disappeared” during ethnic unrest in China‘s north-western region of Xinjiang earlier this month and called on the international community to launch an inquiry.

Speaking during a controversial visit to Japan, Kadeer said Chinese authorities had used undercover “snatch squads” to target Uighurs during clashes between Uighur and Han Chinese in the city of Urumqi on 5 July.

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Background to Uighur unrest

Nick Holdstock, Edinburgh Review | Eurozine, July 12, 2009

The city at the empire’s edge

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous region of China has seen a series of clashes between the majority Uighurs and Han Chinese settlers since the 1980s. But it was in the city of Yining that the largest protest took place on 5 February 1997. Initially written off by the Chinese authorities as an outbreak of random violence, since 9/11 it has been portrayed as the work of Islamist separatists. Nick Holdstock reports on a more nuanced reality of unemployment, religious repression, and the wish for independence.

On 5 February 1997, something happened in Yining, a small border town in northwest China. There was definitely a march, possibly a riot, maybe even a massacre. There were certainly shootings, injuries and deaths.

When you finally reach Yining, after two days on a train from Beijing, then another day on a bus, you will see the same broad streets lined with twostorey, white-tiled buildings that exist in every town in China. You can buy the same pirate DVDs, engine parts, strips of beef suffocated in plastic as you would elsewhere. You will recognise the men with short black hair in blue or black cheap suits, one hand hovering close to their pager, the other holding a cigarette of almost prohibitive strength. There will be overcrowded buses, red taxis with their fare lights on, men and women squatting, waiting, cracking sunflower seeds. Never mind that the sky’s unusually blue, that once, between a gap in the buildings, you glimpse a line of white-toothed mountains. By the time you reach the town square you will have forgotten that Kazakhstan is less than an hour away.

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Muslim reaction to China unrest mostly muted

Ethnic violence in China draws muted response from many Muslim nations

JOSEF FEDERMAN
AP News

Antiwar Newswire, Jul 13, 2009 12:33 EST

China’s crackdown on its Muslim Uighur minority has drawn a muted response from many Muslim countries that may be wary of damaging lucrative trade ties with Beijing or attracting attention to their own attitudes toward political dissent.

The non-Arab countries of Iran and Turkey have been among the few to criticize China. Iran is busy dealing with its own unrest following a disputed presidential election, while Turkey has ethnic ties to China’s Uighur minority.

But throughout much of the Middle East and the Arab world, the violence in China has generated little reaction.

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Xinjiang unrest reveals fragility of Chinese state

John Chan | wsws.org, 13 July 2009

The protests by Xinjiang’s Uighur workers and students on July 5 and the brutal military response of the Chinese government, reveal that, as celebrations for the 60^th anniversary of the 1949 revolution approach, the very foundations of a unified China of 1.3 billion people, 56 ethnic nationalities and numerous languages, are being called into question.

The promises of the Chinese revolution—of building a land of socialism and equality based on the common ownership of means of production, thus unifying workers and peasant masses of all ethnic backgrounds—have long vanished.

The military-police and communal violence that claimed hundreds of lives in Urumqi last week have highlighted the glaring divisions between classes, ethnicities and geo-political regions throughout China, caused by the unequal distribution of social wealth. At the same time, the deployment of heavily-armed troops to Urumqi and other Xinjiang cities once again demonstrates how capitalist exploitation is being imposed.

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