BEIJING: The authorities in the western desert region of Xinjiang in China approved the arrests of nearly 1,300 people in the first 11 months of last year on suspicion of "endangering state security," according to a report published Sunday in an official newspaper.
The number of arrests on that particular charge represents an extraordinary leap over the number in 2007 and is drawing scrutiny from human rights groups.
The newspaper, The Procuratorial Daily, which is published by the Chinese equivalent of the attorney general's office, said that prosecutors' departments in Xinjiang approved 1,295 arrests of individuals and indicted 1,154 of those people. The newspaper article was also posted on a Xinjiang government Web site, lending legitimacy to the statistics.
In 2007, the number of people arrested across all of China on suspicion of endangering state security was 742, according to government statistics. Prosecutors indicted 619 of them.
Of those 2007 numbers, about half were from Xinjiang, said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, citing statistics from the Xinjiang Yearbook, a government publication of regional statistics. That makes the numbers reported on Sunday vastly higher than their 2007 equivalents.
"If this is confirmed, this is very alarming, because it reflects that the threshold of what constitutes a state security crime was considerably lowered last year, in line with the campaign," Bequelin said, referring to a campaign against political crimes and terrorism that the authorities in Xinjiang announced last year before the Beijing Olympic Games.
Chinese officials have said that elements in Xinjiang, a large region that is the homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, are a special threat to the regional and national governments, which are controlled by ethnic Han Chinese. Many Uighurs chafe at what they call discriminatory policies in Xinjiang, and some advocate independence.
Since 2001, when the Bush administration began its war on terror, the Chinese authorities have said that they are battling the "three forces" in Xinjiang: separatism, terrorism and religious extremism.
Waves of crackdowns have taken place.
In 2008, officials made many announcements of arrests and raids in Xinjiang, especially before the Olympic Games, which took place in August. That month, a series of attacks on security forces unfolded in parts of Xinjiang, and Wang Lequan, the regional secretary of the Communist Party, said at a meeting Aug. 13 that the battle against the "three forces" was a "life-or-death struggle."
The charge of endangering state security includes inciting separatism, inciting subversion, stealing state secrets and giving state secrets to foreigners. It can carry the death penalty.
Government statistics show that of all the regions and provinces in China, Xinjiang has had by far the most number of cases of endangering state security, Bequelin said.
"Nobody doubts there are individuals and groups that are advocating the use of anti-state violence, although these people seem to be very low in number and don't constitute major threats to China's state security," Bequelin said. "The problem is that it's impossible to tell from Chinese accounts what proportion of the total are these cases and what are illegitimate cases based on political reasons - people who have expressed dissenting religious and political views."
Huang Yuanxi contributed research.
Royal School of Mines (entrance and the Goldsmiths' wing, Prince Consort Road, London) comprises Imperial College London's Earth Science, Engineering, and Materials departments.
Three British geology students of Imperial College London have been fined in China for "illegal survey and map-making activities", according to local media. In addition to making maps, the students were researching fault lines and earthquake activity in Xinjiang — a tense Muslim province to the west of the country where anger against Chinese rule sparked deadly attacks in 2008. 

The students were gathering additional data in several regions, including Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road trading post, and an oasis city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. 

Under Dr. Jian Guo Liu, the students' supervisor at Imperial College, they also had been in the poor desert village of Keping, where in May local authorities burned the local mosque due to "unlawful religious activities". Of the three students, two of them, a PhD student aged 23, and a Master of Science student aged 22, went to Aksu Prefecture for their research.

In September, State Security Bureau officials had investigated the students at a hotel for several hours. Thereafter, their equipment, including GPS devices, survey results, and data, were seized. The Aksu Land and Resources Bureau officers claimed they had gathered "illegal data" from 6,000 points which was valuable for mineral prospecting and topographical research.

Korla, Xinjiang in the majestic Tian Shan mountain range. May 2007.
In the leadup to last year's summer Olympics in Beijing, China cracked down on map-making and data-collecting across the country. Despite having permission from the Earthquake Administration in the country, the students were fined a combined 20,000 yuan (2,940 dollars) but did not receive additional punishments. "The data they gathered would have been valuable in analysing mineral and topographic features of the areas," Xinjiang Daily said. They returned to the UK on October 2. 

According to The Procuratorial Daily, the Xinjiang prosecutors' office approved 1,295 arrests of individuals and indicted 1,154 suspects from January to November 2008. The indictments were based on suspicion of "endangering state security." In 2007, however, only 742 were arrested, while 619 of them were indicted for the same offense.