China tightens info control after leaks on prison camps… Prominent publisher sentenced 10 years

The Xinjiang regional government in China’s far west is deleting data, destroying documents, tightening controls on information and has held high-level meetings in response to leaks of classified papers on its mass detention camps for Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities, according to four people in contact with government employees there.

Top officials deliberated how to respond to the leaks in meetings at the Chinese Communist Party’s regional headquarters in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, some of the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears of retribution against themselves, family members and the government workers.

The meetings began days after The New York Times published last month a cache of internal speeches on Xinjiang by top leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping. They continued after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists worked with news organizations around the world including The Associated Press to publish secret guidelines for operating detention centers and instructions on how to use technology to target people.

The Chinese government has long struggled with its 11-million-strong Uighur population, an ethnic Turkic minority native to Xinjiang, and in recent years has detained 1 million or more Uighurs and other minorities in the camps.

apnews.com/c1d08873154907be8a3dd93562d6785c

A court in the southwestern Chinese region of Guangxi has handed a 10-year jail term to the former head of a publishing company for”embezzlement, taking bribes and privately sharing state-owned assets,” four years after his initial detention.

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He Linxia was handed a 10-year sentence by Guangxi’s Guanyang CountyPeople’s Court, the rights website Weiquanwang reported.

Prior to his arrest, He was a celebrated figure in China’s publishing industry and had been nominated as one of its Top 10 People of the Year.

He was detained after he published a number of cutting-edge titles under the publisher’s Lixiangguo imprint, including “How the Red Sun Rose,” a historical analysis of the role of late supreme leader Mao Zedong in the rise of the Chinese Communist Party during the 1940s, before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

The book was penned by Nanjing-based history professor Gao Hua, anddetails Mao’s role in a series of factional struggles and internal “purges” during the period, using official archives of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

www.rfa.org/english/news/china/publisher-jailed-12132019124146.html

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