Independent Chinese PEN Center

Ilham Tohti’s unjust fate says much about the Chinese Communist Party’s dark vision for the web’s future.

BY DAVID WERTIME SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

Here is what a court in Urumqi, the capital of China’s western Xinjiang region, concludes Ilham Tohti, a balding, thick-set, 44-year-old professor, did: “Using ‘Uighur Online’ as a platform, and taking advantage of his role as a university professor,” Tohti “spread separatist notions” and “bewitched and coerced” seven of his students to join into an eight-person, web-powered splittist clique with international reach. Here is what Tohti, by all appearances, actually did: He created and maintained a Chinese-language website, called Uighur Online, that provided a bridge between China’s Han majority and its Uighur minority, a Turkic-language-speaking, predominantly Muslim group that mostly lives in Xinjiang and has an uneasy history of coexistence with the growing number of Han who live among them, one marred by violent clashes. Continue reading →