Arrests rise in China's Muslim region

BEIJING, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Chinese officials are making many more arrests in the western region of Xinjiang, homeland of a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, statistics show.

The minority, called the Uighurs, have been the subject of past crackdowns on dissent, and now official statistics show that nearly 1,300 people were arrested in Xinjiang on suspicion of "endangering state security" in the first 11 months of 2008, The New York Times reported Monday.

That total represents a big jump from the 742 people arrested on the charge in all of China in 2007, government statistics indicate.

"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," Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, told the Times, referring to a crackdown on dissent and terrorism that Xinjiang authorities announced last year ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

China maintains that Uighur elements in Xinjiang are a threat to the regional and national governments, which are controlled by ethnic Han Chinese, the newspaper said.