Page 125 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

114 Michael Dillon
television news bulletins. Part of the reason for this is the genuine difficulty of
obtaining anything remotely resembling accurate information on what is still a
remote and inaccessible region. The Chinese government has strongly discour-
aged journalists from visiting Xinjiang and for many years, western journalists
based in Beijing were not allowed to visit the region at all on pain of losing their
accreditation. Carefully managed visits by groups of journalists have been
arranged by the authorities since China’s declaration of its support for the ‘war on
terror’, in an attempt to garner international support for the suppression of East
Turkistan sentiment, but access to ordinary Uyghurs, particularly those living in
outlying areas, has been severely restricted. The Uyghurs’ struggle for indepen-
dence has never in any case been a popular one, whereas the Tibetan cause which
has a very similar rationale seems to have won almost universal acceptance.
The Chinese official media, which is of course state-controlled, has clearly run
into considerable difficulties in its coverage of the conflict. Until relatively
recently there was no coverage at all in the main national press People’s Daily and
Guangming Daily (the preferred daily newspaper of the intelligentsia) or Chinese
Central Television which, when it ran stories about Xinjiang, concentrated almost
entirely on positive economic successes in the time-honoured fashion. Even in the
provincial daily newspaper Xinjiang Daily, little space was devoted to the sepa-
ratist issue in an attempt to marginalise it and underplay its significance. This
changed during the 1990s when from time to time, there were reports of court
cases against Uyghurs convicted of crimes linked to separatist activities that were
intended to serve as a warning to others. This also applies to the broadcast media,
in particular Xinjiang Radio, broadcasting from Urumqi.
Local newspapers in Xinjiang below the provincial level, which are published in
Chinese and Uyghur editions, are a much better source of detailed information on
separatist activities seen from the point of view of the Chinese government.
However, for that very reason their circulation is restricted and they are classified as
neibu (internal) which means that they were for the eyes of party cadres and selected
trusted outsiders only. This classification was formerly very common throughout the
whole of China, for newspapers, other periodicals and books and there were even
higher levels of classified documents which could only be read by the most senior
party officials, but the system gradually fell into abeyance in the 1980s as the
‘reform and opening’ programme inspired by Deng Xiaoping developed and has
effectively ended with the exception of genuinely secret material which refers to
national defence and to sensitive areas such as Xinjiang. The attitude of the Beijing
authorities to these neibu publications can be gauged by the eight-year prison sen-
tence that Rabiya Kadeer received for sending state secrets abroad – these were runs
of Kashghar Daily sent to her husband in the United States. Local television, espe-
cially the channels that broadcast in Uyghur (and in Kazakh in northern Xinjiang)
also cover separatist issues as a warning to the populace not to become involved. The
trials and the sentences handed down are reported, and often accompanied by footage
of the humiliated ‘criminals’, heads bowed being led away to prison or to execution.
Long-term residents of Xinjiang confirm, however, that they have never seen detailed
coverage of major disturbances broadcast on local television in the region.