April 01, 2015
A veiled Uighur woman sitting at a food stall in Kashgar.
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The article, about a Muslim couple in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang being sentenced to prison for growing a long beard and wearing a burqa, appeared in state news media on Sunday. By Monday morning, it had vanished.
Such occurrences are commonplace in China, where censors frequently purge without explanation online information that the government deems sensitive. What happened next was not.
A veiled Uighur woman sitting at a food stall in Kashgar.
On Monday afternoon, someone claiming to be the reporter who wrote the deleted article for the Kashgar Special Zone News, which covers the ethnically divided region of Xinjiang, posted a cryptic confession on the popular social messaging service Weixin.
“The report wasn’t verified with thorough interviews, which caused serious inconsistencies with facts and violated the authenticity of news,” the person wrote. “I hereby sincerely apologize.”
In countries with free media and established journalistic ethics, such a mea culpa would be taken at face value. But China’s state-controlled media must obey the ruling Communist Party, which often suppresses truth in the name of “social stability.” Corrections are rare. By Tuesday, the apology, too, had disappeared.
The online censorship and strange, if fleeting, apology open a window into the Chinese media’s spotty record on transparency and trust, problems made all the more troubling when applied to Xinjiang, where the authorities are trying to assimilate the region’s Uighur minority, a largely Sunni Muslim, Turkic-speaking people, into the ethnic Han mainstream.
In recent years, clashes between the two communities have claimed hundreds of lives, which the Chinese government tends to blame on separatist Islamic terrorists. Critics say the crackdown that has intensified in Xinjiang is also seeking to quash expressions of Uighur cultural identity and religion.
Uighurs have complained of job discrimination and the suppression of Uighur-language education as millions of Han migrants have settled in Xinjiang, the Uighurs’ ancient homeland. Much of the violence has occurred in and around Kashgar, an oasis city on the storied Silk Road.
Reporting in the region has become difficult for foreign journalists, who are often tailed by security agents or barred from certain areas by the police. The information blackout has left outsiders largely dependent on terse state media reports that include few confirmable details. Some incidents are only reported by Uighur-speaking journalists and advocates based outside of China.According to the deleted article, an unidentified 38-year-old man was sentenced to six years in prison and his wife to two years by the Kashgar People’s Court for ignoring regulations aimed at “wiping out” the wearing of long beards, burqas and face veils. The couple was part of a larger group of lawbreakers “blinded by extreme religious thoughts,” according to the article.
