IN CHINA, AN IRRATIONAL INDICTMENT

Ellen Bork


On July 30, Chinese communist authorities
indicted Ilham Tohti, a Uighur intellectual, on charges of separatism, a charge that could carry the death penalty. Tohti was detained in mid-January, and the timing of the indictment seems related to an attack the Chinese authorities claim was carried out by knife-wielding militants in the Uighur homeland, which China calls Xinjiang, near Kashgar. An overseas Uighur group says the violence took place around a protest against Chinese restrictions on the observance of Ramadan.
It is impossible to know what really
happened. China allows no independent
monitoring and little access to Xinjiang, a
large but remote area that is home to China’s Turkic Muslim Uighurs.
Tohti, however, is an open book. He is an
academic economist who focuses on China’s
policies toward its minorities. He is known
for rejecting violence and seeking improved
conditions for Uighurs under Chinese rule,
including by telling the Party how their
policies backfire. Tohti’s daughter Jewher,
now a student in the U.S., testified before a
congressional commission about her father in April.
He is, she said, exactly the sort of person a rational Chinese political structure would seek to engage with in order to address the conditions of the Uyghur people. Instead, by arresting my father and threatening him with charges that carry the severest of penalties it has driven many Uighurs to a point at which they can’t even imagine that their wholly justified grievances can get any sort of a hearing under Chinese rule.
Tragically, for Tohti and other citizens of
China, the Party is not rational when it comes to those who question their rule.
Worse, Beijing’s propaganda about the
Uighurs frequently goes unchallenged. It
would be a full time job to bat down each
and every pernicious Chinese Communist
Party statement about the Uighurs. But not to do so puts the U.S. in the position of
appearing to accept Beijing’s policies. On July 16, the Obama administration hosted Chinese officials in Washington for a
“Counterterrorism Dialogue.” According to a terse official announcement from the State Department, “the two sides noted their
opposition to terrorism in all forms.” In light of China’s depiction of Uighurs’ cause as “terrorist,” the Obama administration should clarify the U.S. definition of terrorism publicly—explicitly excluding non-violent, peaceful speech and association—and refuse cooperation with China so long as it peddles nonsense, and arrests and tries people like Tohti.
Tohti should be released. His treatment will
be a test of how far the Chinese Communist
Party will go to conflate non-violent,
intellectual opposition with crimes that carry long prison terms and even the death
penalty. It is also a test of how far the U.S.
Congress and the Obama administration will go to speak up for Tohti who is, in his
daughter’s words, “an honest, outspoken
dissident.”