A life sentence given to a moderate Chinese academic on Tuesday shows that the Chinese Communist Party is cutting off dialogue on ethnic tensions and could end up radicalizing minority groups already resentful of central government rule, academics and analysts said.
A court found economics professor Ilham Tohti, an ethnic Uighur Muslim, guilty of separatism and sentenced him to life in prison. It was the most severe penalty in a decade for illegal political speech in China and eclipsed the 11-year jail sentence given Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) on subversion charges.
“Ilham Tohti’s situation gives scholars like me who ... work on the issue great concern about our safety and academic freedom,” an academics said after Tuesday’s sentencing, requesting anonymity because of fear of punishment from authorities.
Tohti is seen as a moderate voice with ties to both ethnic Uighurs and the Han Chinese majority. A party member and professor at Beijing’s Minzu University, he ran the Web site Uighur Online that highlighted issues affecting the ethnic group.
The life sentence “is a very disturbing message, as the door to dialogue is closed because this scholar promoted dialogue between the Uighurs and the Chinese intellectuals,” said Willy Lam (林和立), a political analyst at the City University of Hong Kong. “Beijing’s message is that they do not look to dialogue with the Uighurs, but suppression.”
China says it faces grave terror threats, particularly in Xinjiang, the ancestral home of Uighurs. Riots in 2009 in the regional capital of Urumqi killed nearly 200 people and violence over the past year-and-a-half has left more than 300 people dead, nearly half shot by police in a strike-hard campaign by the government to fight what it calls terrorist cells.
Beijing has blamed the unrest on foreign-influenced terrorists seeking a separate state.
Yet many Muslim Uighurs bristle under Beijing’s heavy-handed restrictions on their religious life and resent the influx of the Han majority into their homeland.
For years, Tohti has been speaking openly about the problems in his home region.
“At present in Xinjiang, the exclusion of and discrimination against Uighurs is quite systematic, with the government leading the way,” he said in an interview with Voice of America last year, following a deadly attack involving Uighurs in the heart of Beijing.
Prosecutors said Tohti was the ringleader of “a criminal gang seeking to split the country” and “caused severe harm to national security and social stability.”
His lawyers said the academic’s remarks — on the Internet, in his classrooms or with foreign media — did not advocate separatism and instead sought to resolve the region’s ethnic tensions.
“The sentencing will clearly have a chilling effect on other minority scholars, especially those within the Uighur and Tibetan communities, whose voices and opinions are clearly crucial to fixing some of the problems with China’s ethnic policies and creating an environment more conducive to interethnic harmony,” said James Leibold, an expert on ethnic policies at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
Tuesday’s verdict drew international condemnation.
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