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| A picture of the town of Ganzi in the Tibetan Autonomous Region in western Sichuan Province, China, taken in 2005. Image credit: Colegota / CC BY-SA 2.5 ES |
China’s Fifth Judicial Reform Plan Outline in 2019 committed itself to an “open, dynamic, transparent, convenient sunshine judicial system.” Although much progress has been made in the number of court rulings and judgments posted online, the level of transparency varies by case type, crime, and region. Criminal cases classified as endangering state security (ESS) are among the least transparent.
Part of this is because judges frequently exercise their discretion to decide what information, including rulings and judgments, to publish. They may also conceal information about cases they deem “inappropriate for posting.” In regions rocked by incidents of ethnic unrest, accessing information about ESS cases is considered difficult or even impossible at times due to media blackouts which occur periodically following violent clashes with Han Chinese.
While this presumption about judicial transparency holds true in Xinjiang, it does not accurately reflect the availability of Chinese government sources with regard to ethnic minority prisoners who are convicted of political crimes in the Tibetan regions outside of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and Han-majority provinces.
Despite being a restive region, Ganzi, or Garze, a Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture occupying the western arm of Sichuan Province, is the top region in all of China with the highest number of publicly disclosed ESS court rulings and judgments. In Ganzi, 26 of the 28 publicly disclosed ESS cases concerned the crime of inciting splittism (煽动分裂国家罪). Dui Hua previously reported that the Ganzi Intermediate People’s Court convicted nine Tibetans of inciting splittism between June and August 2020. In the last four months of 2020 the same court released five more judgments involving six defendants who were tried for the same crime.
Aba, also known as Ngaba, similarly maintains a high level of transparency notwithstanding an astonishing number of self-immolation protests which occurred in the prefecture between 2012 and 2017. This Tibetan prefecture in northwestern Sichuan is ranked third in Table 1, with 20 ESS rulings and judgments disclosed on China Judgements Online. Thirteen of them were trials of inciting splittism. In 2020 alone, eight judgments were posted online by the Ganzi Intermediate People’s Court.
Dui Hua previously reported that Xinjiang makes up the majority of China’s ESS cases (see Court Statistics on Splittism and Inciting Splittism, Part II: Uyghurs and Tibetans for a detailed analysis). The Chinese government has made an apparent attempt to obfuscate information in the autonomous region. At the time of writing, none of the ESS rulings and judgments on China Judgements Online were disclosed in Xinjiang. A small number of Xinjiang ESS court judgments Dui Hua unearthed earlier from court websites have since been taken down.
Political Prisoner Database
The names of political prisoners convicted of inciting splittism can also be found in other open-source materials. In its “official registry,” Dui Hua’s restricted-access Political Prisoner Database (PPDB) has information on 250 individuals who were tried nationwide for inciting splittism. The cases referred to here were collected from official sources including court judgments and rulings, state-run news media reports, judicial annals available in libraries and electronic yearbooks, and responses provided to Dui Hua by Chinese interlocutors.
Access to information in Xinjiang is far more restricted than in Tibetan regions. Table 3 shows that about 60 percent of people tried for inciting splittism in the official registry are in the Tibetan plateau, compared to only 38 people, or 17 percent, in the entire Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) including It is worth noting that the eight percent remainder also involved Uyghurs, they were scattered across Han-majority provinces, including Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, Henan, Liaoning, and Jilin also involved Uyghurs.
Ganzi comes out on top of all regions in Table 4; 68 prisoners convicted of inciting splittism are recorded in the official registry of the PPDB. The number is 11 times higher than that of Kashgar, Xinjiang, with records in the PPDB. The contrast is striking when we factor in a 2009 Chinese court report, which stated that more than 60 percent of Xinjiang’s ESS cases were tried in Kashgar. The paucity of prisoner information in the Uyghur prefecture has left the identities, acts, and fates of many of those convicted of inciting splittism unknown.
Labelled “the self-immolation capital” by The New York Times, Aba comes as a distant second in Table 4. The latest Tibetan to set himself ablaze, in November 2019, occurred in Aba.
Aba is followed by Huangnan, a Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai. It was another site of self-immolations and clashes between monks and Chinese security forces similar to Ganzi and Aba from 2012-2017.
In Qinghai, people tried for inciting splittism are not exclusively Tibetans. According to court judgments posted online, three ethnic Mongols were sentenced to nine to ten years in prison in the provincial capital of Xining in October 2008. Their imprisonment was likely related to the unrest in Tibet. Originally from Huangnan, they were detained in April 2008, just a month after the unrest in Lhasa set in motion a series of protests and demonstrations across the Tibetan plateau.
Outside of Xinjiang
Official information about Uyghur political cases appears more accessible outside of Xinjiang, at least for a brief period. Table 5 shows a breakdown of inciting splittism trials in the official registry of the PPDB. Of the 19 prisoners who were tried for inciting splittism in Han-majority provinces, all but one were Uyghurs.
- Rozi Wulayimu, born in 1985, was a cake seller who traveled back and forth to Guangzhou from Yiwu, Zhejiang, prior to detention in January 2015. While in Yiwu, he became acquainted with what prosecutors called a Uyghur “religious extremist” (zongjiao jiduan fenzi 宗教极端分子). According to the judgment, the “religious extremist” called the ban on veils and beards in Xinjiang a repression of Islam. The “religious extremist” bought Rozi a cellphone. It was preinstalled with Voxer, an app best known for walkie-talkie messaging, and another app with access to IRIB World Service, Iran’s international broadcasting radio network.
Rozi did not use the preinstalled apps until after he moved back to Guangzhou in late 2014. IRIB World Service allegedly contained articles and images of violence, “East Turkestan,” and the “Holy War.” This browsing history became evidence of him inciting others to split China. Additionally, Rozi used Voxer to contact the “religious extremist,” who shared the idea of them illicitly going overseas. Uyghurs could not legally exit China because of tight travel restrictions placed on them, said Rozi during the trial. Rozi also expressed having a strong impulse to leave China because he was deeply moved by the contents of IRIB World Service. However, he dismissed this idea as he could not bear to leave his parents behind in China.
In July 2016, Rozi was sentenced to two years in prison by the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court. Rozi was released from prison in January 2017, having already spent 17 months in custody prior to conviction.
A Uyghur farmer, whose name was redacted in the judgment, was sentenced to two years in prison in Nanjing on July 17, 2015. He signed in to his QQ account with his cellphone and from cybercafes, where he disseminated audio and video messages of “religious extremism, the Holy War, and ethnic hatred.” Additionally, he was accused of sharing links to Turkistan Times, a multilingual news website covering news about Xinjiang.
Cases are also documented in China’s northeast provinces. Eli Exmet studied at Changchun’s Northeast Normal University. The then-25-year-old student was sentenced to eight years in prison in October 2014. Prosecutors accused him of teaching private religious classes to Uyghurs studying there. In the classes, he raised funds from attendees to buy tablets and removable storage to use as teaching tools and explained why he supported the “Holy War” and “East Turkestan” with information he downloaded and copied from e-books and online videos.
Another defendant, Metabdulla Iminniyaz, born in 1992, was sentenced to six years in prison. He was in charge of lecturing on Arabic-language videos. According to the judgment, he expressed the idea of “driving away all bad Han Chinese in Xinjiang” in his classes.
Born in 1993, a Uyghur barbeque shop worker was sentenced to three years in prison in Dalian in February 2016. His name was redacted in the judgment. He was accused of uploading images from 2013-2014 containing violence and religious extremism to his personal cloud storage. Since he did not set a passcode to restrict access, the images were seen by many of the over 200 people on his contact list. Among the images was a map of China separating Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang from Chinese territory. Xinjiang was also labelled “East Turkestan” and painted blue with a white crescent flag.
