China Reform Monitor: No. 714

August 28:

To uncover potential terrorist plots during China’s October 1 National Day, 200,000 police in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region have been mobilized to “check and register” the transient population, the South China Morning Post reports. The force will sweep hotel rooms, rental apartments and remote villages for separatists and set up checkpoints between townships and between villages. In the Kashgar and Hotan prefectures the feudal-era "10-household mutually insured system" is being reinstated.

[Editor’s Note: The 10-household system means that if one person is found guilty, he will implicate members of the 10 neighboring families. These measures come on the heels of a spate of attacks of police and government offices. On August 4 two Uygurs rammed a truck into a squad of 70 jogging border police in Kashgar before detonating two bombs, killing 16 officers and injuring 16 others. On August 10 a series of explosions hit the city of Kuqa, killing at least 12 people. Another three security guards were stabbed to death by assassins at a checkpoint in Shule, an outlying county under the jurisdiction of Kashgar prefecture.]


August 30:

Wei Wen Po reports that at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) eighth meeting in Tajikistan's capital of Dushanbe, China and Russia clashed over the wording of the joint communiqué after Russia tried to add language about Georgia's aggression and purported acts of ethnic cleansing and China’s insisted it be removed. The SCO members also refused to support Russia's recognition of the independence of two separatist areas in Georgia, a decision that disappointed Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. China’s President, Hu Jintao, attended the gathering along with the heads of the other five SCO member states.


August 31:

The governor of southern Sudan’s oil-rich Upper Nile State, Gatluak Deng Garang, has concluded a week-long official visit to China where he met government officials and major players in China’s oil and construction sectors, the Sudan Tribune reports. The Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister, Zhai Jun, affirmed Beijing’s support for the people of Southern Sudan and the General Manager of the Chinese National Petroleum Company (CNPC) assured Garang of his company's cooperation with the local authorities. Garang also reviewed the model low-cost houses the BNBM Construction Company has agreed to build and held talks with Chinese Wisdom Company, which will revitalize irrigation and mechanized agricultural schemes in the impoverished Upper Nile State.


September 3:

The PLA General Armament Department has denied a news report in the Wen Wei Po that the "Shenzhou VII" manned spaceship will be launched ahead of schedule at end of the month. "We don't know how they have got this information. We have never released such news," the statement said. In June this year, a news spokesman of the China Manned Spacecraft Engineering Office announced that the "Shenzhou VII" manned spaceship will be launched in October at an appropriate time with three astronauts and that one of the astronauts is scheduled to conduct a space walk, the Zhongguo Tongxun She reports.


September 5:

Russia’s Interfax-AVN News Agency reports that after meetings of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states’ “top brass of security agencies and special services” in Volgograd, Russia, the group’s joint special forces held antiterrorist exercises codenamed "Volgograd Anti-Terror 2008." Simulated terrorists seized a tanker and took its crew hostage, and airborne SCO troops boarded the vessel after snipers had neutralized the “terrorists” and freed the “hostages.” The simulation, sponsored by Russia’s Lukoil, took place at the riverside wharf of the company’s Volgograd refinery. Similar exercises were held in Budyonovsk in 2003, and in Volgograd and Perm in 2004.

[Editor’s Note: Despite the reported participation of China’s People’s Liberation Army in these maneuvers, an extensive search of Chinese press materials yielded no reports of PLA involvement in this joint SCO exercise.]