China has waged a campaign to extinguish terrorist violence in its Central Asian frontier region of Xinjiang. Its effectiveness is hard to assess from the government’s latest statistics.
Chinese courts convicted 1,419 people for “harming state security,” including taking part in violent acts of terrorism, in 2015, Supreme People’s Court President Zhou Qiang said in a speech before the China’s rubber-stamp parliament in the Great Hall of the People on Sunday.
Mr. Zhou didn’t say how that number compared with the year before when Beijing launched an all-out effort to eradicate the terrorist threat. A year ago, Mr. Zhou’s report to the congress showed that 712 people had been convicted of taking part in “terrorist attacks, secessionist activities and other related crimes” in 2014.
This year, Mr. Zhou said China’s courts “enthusiastically participated” in antiterror activities and “escalated attacks on crimes including inciting separatism, taking part in a terrorist organization and spreading violent terrorist videos.” But he didn’t break down how many among the 1,419 convicted for state security crimes were specifically convicted for offenses related to terrorism.
A rise in terror convictions would be good news for a government that has made fighting terrorism a priority following a spate of deadly attacks in the northwestern territory of Xinjiang and elsewhere in 2014.
Yet it’s not clear that terror convictions grew much at all.
The confusion arises from Mr. Zhou’s change in wording. While participation in terrorist attacks and secessionist activities are relatively specific offenses, “harming state security,” the term Mr. Zhou used on Sunday, refers to a much broader family of crimes that includes subversion, espionage and sharing of state secrets.
“The categories aren’t comparable,” said Susan Finder, a Hong Kong-based legal consultant.
The San Francisco-based human rights group Dui Hua Foundation published a report estimating the number of Chinese people indicted on state security charges in 2014 at 1,411. The group based its estimate on statistics provided in the China Law Yearbook, published by the official association representing Chinese legal scholars.
Since very few criminal defendants are found innocent in state security trials, that number is a reasonable stand-in for the number of state security convictions in 2014—which suggests the number of convictions barely grew last year.
Zunyou Zhou, an expert in counter-terror law at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, cautioned against comparing Dui Hua’s estimate of state security convictions with numbers from Supreme People’s Court, saying they likely used different methods of calculation. Still, he said, it was “interesting” that state security and terrorism had been combined in Zhou Qiang’s annual report this year.
“A possible reason for this is that the Supreme People’s Court does not want the public to know the exact numbers of state security or terrorism cases, because both are considered very sensitive in nature,” he said.
Beijing blames much of the violence in Xinjiang on separatists from the mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic group. Uighur groups and human-rights advocates say government restrictions on religion, language and other expressions of Uighur identity and an influx of Han Chinese into the region are fueling resentment and violence. Beijing denies any discrimination and maintains that its policies have brought stability and prosperity to the region.
The government’s response to the terrorism threat has been forceful on the ground and on the legal front. Security forces wrapped up a year-long campaign to snuff out terrorist cells in Xinjiang in May. Lawmakers, meanwhile, significantly expanded the the range of terrorist offenses listed in the criminal code to make way for a sweeping new antiterror law that was adopted in December.
In addition to punishing the planning and carrying out of terrorist attacks, Chinese law now also criminalizes possessing terrorist or extremist materials and coercing people into wearing items of clothing associated with terrorism or extremism.
Whether or not those efforts accounted for an increase in terror-related convictions last year, legal scholars have warned that the expanded definition of terrorist crimes could lead to abuses in the future.
“Some of these provisions are troubling both because of their harsh penalties for crimes increasingly distant from actual violent acts of terror, and their tendency to conflate religious extremism with violent terrorism,” Jeremy Daum, senior research fellow at the Yale China Law Center, wrote in a blog post in September after the legal amendments were unveiled. “With no clear and objective definition of extremism it is easy to imagine these provisions becoming a vehicle for religious intolerance.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/13/china-suggests-terror-convictions-surged-did-they/
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