How questioning China’s security crackdown in Xinjiang led to a 20-year jail term
Electronics salesman Zhang Haitao raised on social media whether the massive anti-terrorism campaign in Xinjiang was fuelling resentment among Muslim Uygurs
Zhang Haitao was a rare voice in China, a member of the ethnic Han majority who for years had criticised the government on social media for its treatment of the minority Muslim Uygurs.
Zhang’s wife had long feared some sort of backlash despite her husband’s relative obscurity. He was a working-class electronics salesman, unknown even to most Uygur activists.
So she worried that the authorities might block his social media accounts, or maybe detain him. Instead he was arrested and prosecuted for subversion and espionage. His punishment – 20 years in prison.
“They wanted to make an example of him, to scare anyone who might question what they do in the name of security,” Zhang’s wife, Li Aijie, said earlier this week, one day after she arrived in the United States and asked for political asylum. “Even someone who knows nothing about law would know that his punishment made no sense.”
Elsewhere in China, Zhang would have been sentenced to no more than three years, said his lawyer, Li Dunyong, and may not have been prosecuted at all.
But Xinjiang, the tense northwestern region where most Uygurs live, has been enveloped in recent years in a vast dragnet of police surveillance, which the authorities insist is needed to root out separatism and Islamic extremism. Zhang, who moved to Xinjiang from central Henan province more than a decade ago in search of work, wondered in his social media posts whether these policies were stoking resentment among Uygurs. He warned that China’s restrictions on the Uygurs’ religious practices risked sparking an insurgency.
