Regional lawmakers call for a local ethnic-unity law, political-legal chief left off the new standing committee, Ilham Tohti turns 57 in prison

October 26, 2026 Közet Staff

Közet’s daily roundup of news on Uyghurs, their homeland, and the world around them. Monday, October 26, 2026. This edition covers Friday, October 23, from 10 a.m. Eastern, through Monday morning.

TOP LINE

The regional people’s congress standing committee on Sunday called for “accelerating the drafting of regional implementing regulations” for China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, two days after the new party leadership was seated, Xinjiang Daily, the regional party committee’s newspaper, reported. The 46-member session in Urumqi, chaired by Zumret Obul, also called for “firmly grasping” the publicizing and enforcement of that law, the national common-language law and the region’s language-work regulation, and for turning “the party’s propositions” into “the common will” of the region’s people “through legal procedures.” It voted through unnamed appointments and removals and swore in the new officials under the constitution; the report lists no names or posts. The national law, in force since July 1, is the statute under which the party’s “forging a shared consciousness of the Chinese nation” line becomes enforceable duty for local governments, schools and media; regional implementing regulations are where penalties and reporting duties are usually spelled out. The standing committee’s statement is a legislative direction, not a draft — no text, consultation period or adoption date was published. (Xinjiang Daily, the regional party committee’s newspaper)

HOMELAND

Ilham Tohti turned 57 in prison on Sunday. The Uyghur economist, born October 25, 1969, in Atush (Atushi), marked his birthday serving the life sentence a Urumqi court imposed in September 2014, after a two-day trial, for what it called “separatism”; police had detained him in a raid on his Beijing home on January 15, 2014, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found the detention arbitrary that March, and the regional high court rejected his appeal on November 21, 2014, according to PEN International, which has campaigned for his release since. Prosecutors cited his translation of articles about the region for Uyghur Online, the bilingual website he founded in 2006, and his interviews with foreign media as having “internationalized” the region’s problems, PEN says, citing media accounts of the trial. Tohti taught economics at Minzu University in Beijing; the European Parliament, announcing his 2019 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, called him “a voice of moderation and reconciliation” sentenced after “a show trial” and urged his release. His daughter, Jewher Ilham, who lives in the United States, has said publicly that the family has had no word from him since 2017; nothing new on his health or conditions was published around the birthday. (PEN International; European Parliament)

Chen’s first orders: stability as “the crux,” the south as the “eye” of the board. In three meetings reported by Xinjiang Daily between Friday night and Saturday, the new regional party secretary set the committee’s priorities. In his first-plenum speech Friday afternoon, Chen Xiaojiang called stability “the crux” of the region’s work, said what it calls “counterterrorism and stability maintenance” should be made “law-based and routine,” with the party, government, military, police, XPCC and public jointly “strengthening the border,” and called strengthening identification with the state and the Chinese nation the policy that “governs the root.” He described the south as the “eye” of the board, to be worked through “attracting people with industry, shaping them through education, gathering them in towns and keeping them through careers,” and pledged the regional party committee’s “unified leadership” over the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). At a separate session the same afternoon he told officials to keep an “unwavering” high-pressure crackdown on the “three forces” — the party’s label for what it calls “separatism, extremism and terrorism” — ahead of the Central Committee’s fifth plenum. On Saturday the new standing committee held its first meeting, assigned members’ portfolios without publishing them, and retook the party oath at the museum of a Red Army-descended division of the Xinjiang Military Region. None of the three reports names a new measure, deadline or budget. (Xinjiang Daily, the regional party committee’s newspaper)

Political-legal chief left off the standing committee. Wang Gang, 53, secretary of the regional party’s political and legal affairs commission — the body overseeing police, prosecutors and courts — was not elected to the new 14-member standing committee, Caixin, a Beijing-based financial news outlet, reported Saturday night. Caixin identified the two newcomers as Nie Zhuang, Kashgar prefecture’s party secretary and a regional vice chair, and Li Guoliang, party secretary of the regional education department, and noted the committee is one seat smaller than the 15 elected in 2021. Wang sat in the presidium’s front row at Friday’s closing session. Neither Caixin nor Xinjiang Daily has reported where he goes next or who takes over the political-legal portfolio. (Caixin; Xinjiang Daily)

Regional economy grew 4.2% through September; retail sales barely moved. The region’s GDP for January–September was 1.643 trillion yuan, up 4.2% in real terms, the regional statistics office said at a government news conference on Monday, according to Xinjiang Daily. Industrial added value at larger firms rose 8.0%, with 10 of 12 key sectors growing; manufacturing investment rose 6.4% and infrastructure investment 1.5%. Retail sales rose 0.7% to 296 billion yuan — a pace the office described as 1.9 points faster than the first half, after 2.38 billion yuan in consumption subsidies this year, a separate Xinjiang Daily video report said. The figures are the office’s own; no outside body audits regional accounts. The retail number — the one that tracks what households actually spend — is the weakest in the release even after the subsidies, and the release gives no breakdown for the south of the region, no employment or income figures and no XPCC figure. (Xinjiang Daily, the regional party committee’s newspaper)

Sixteen measures to clear unsold housing. Nine regional departments led by the housing and construction department have issued 16 measures to reduce the stock of unsold commercial property, Xinjiang Daily reported Monday: a 30-million-yuan regional fund to reward localities that move inventory, wider uses of housing provident-fund savings, permission to convert unbuilt commercial land and unsold non-residential projects to housing, purchases of unsold flats by universities, hospitals and businesses for dormitories, hotels or elder care, and the use of special local-government bonds to buy back idle land from developers. The package implies a glut it never sizes: the report gives no inventory figure, no deadline and no breakdown by prefecture; the measures themselves have not been published. (Xinjiang Daily, the regional party committee’s newspaper)

Beijing-funded program sends 1,000 Hotan schoolchildren to Tiananmen Square. Eighty-five students and teachers from Hotan, including from Hotan No. 9 Middle School, watched the flag-raising on Tiananmen Square on the morning of October 24 under a program titled “I Love Beijing Tiananmen,” part of a series of what it calls “融铸式” — “fused” — exchange activities for Hotan students, according to a dispatch by Beijing’s aid-to-Xinjiang work team in Hotan published Monday on the platform of The Beijing News, a Beijing municipal party outlet. The dispatch says the program will take 1,000 primary and secondary students from across Hotan city to Beijing in batches for one-week trips, paid for with Beijing’s “pairing assistance” funds and supported by the Beijing aid command in Hotan; it describes the participants as “multi-ethnic” and names no other stop. Its headline frames the visit through Kurban Tulum, the Hotan farmer whose 1958 meeting with Mao is a fixture of the region’s official iconography. The dispatch is the aid program’s own account, not reporting by the newspaper; it gives no cost, no selection criteria and no number of trips completed. Separately, a clip from Douyin, the Chinese short-video platform, reposted on October 25 by the X account 李老师不是你老师 (“Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher”), which relays Chinese social-media content and had 113,000 views on the post by Monday morning, shows a group of students in matching uniforms, white caps and lanyard badges, with flag stickers on their cheeks, in front of Tiananmen on October 24, one of them in tears while making patriotic remarks that invoke Kurban Tulum; the Douyin comments visible in the clip — more than 2,400 — mock the scene, with “North Korean kid” and “direct admission to the Central Academy of Drama” among those the account quotes. The account calls the students “Xinjiang students” and gives no school or program. The date, the place and the Kurban Tulum reference match the Hotan trip; neither the account nor the aid program has said they are the same group. (Beijing aid-to-Xinjiang work team, via The Beijing News; 李老师不是你老师 on X)

DIASPORA

Still no decision on the two pardoned men in Bangkok. Thailand’s National Security Council had not announced by Monday morning where the two Uyghur men pardoned last week will be sent; the immigration bureau’s Thursday remarks to AFP, carried by the Bangkok Post on Saturday, remain the only Thai official statement published on the case. Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission found in November 2025 that the government, the National Security Council and the immigration bureau broke Thai and international law in deporting 40 Uyghurs that February, relying on Chinese assurances without verifiable evidence of consent, according to Safeguard Defenders, an advocacy group that published the finding; the commission’s own text has not been published in English. Two weeks after that deportation, on March 14, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a visa-restriction policy under Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act for current or former foreign officials “responsible for, or complicit in” forced returns of Uyghurs to China, and said he was immediately applying it to Thai officials involved in the February 27 deportation; the statement named no individuals, and the department has not published who was restricted. (AFP via Bangkok Post; Safeguard Defenders; U.S. Department of State)

INTERNATIONAL

A Taliban road reaches the Chinese border, which stays shut. The Taliban inaugurated a 121-kilometer gravel road through Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor to the Chinese frontier on October 4, but two fences still bar the pass at nearly 5,000 meters and there is no connecting road on the Chinese side, Bruce Pannier wrote Friday in an analysis for The Times of Central Asia, a Bishkek-based outlet. He argues Beijing has little interest in opening the route, citing two separate security concerns: the presence in Afghanistan of Uyghur fighters whom China labels “ETIM,” and attacks launched from Afghan territory that killed five Chinese nationals in Tajikistan in November 2025, which the article does not attribute to any group. The reading of Beijing’s intentions is the author’s. (The Times of Central Asia, analysis)

MEDIA WATCH

Three foreign delegations, one itinerary, in the week the new leadership was seated. Between Friday and Sunday, Xinjiang Daily, the regional party committee’s newspaper, published three features on foreign visitors: a Russian regional human-rights commissioner (October 19–22), a “German Friends of the Greens delegation” (October 8–20) and Djibouti’s foreign minister, identified only as Omar (October 22–24). All three were taken to the “Xinjiang’s Struggle Against Terrorism and Extremism” exhibition in Urumqi; two to the regional 70th-anniversary showcase, which the Djibouti report says includes a reconstruction of Daryaboyi, a Uyghur village in Keriye (Yutian) county whose residents were relocated out of the desert; and all three were quoted praising stability or rejecting “Western” accounts. None of the three reports says who organized or paid for the trip. The German group’s leader, given as Jürgen Kurz, is described as an electrical engineer who first visited the Kök-Yar afforestation site in Aksu in 2021; in July 2021 Xinhua profiled a “German Green Party member” of that name, resident in China since 2003, who called Western reporting on the region fabricated. Neither report explains how the group relates to Germany’s Alliance 90/The Greens or what “Friends of the Greens” is; the other five members appear only as Chinese transliterations of their names. The three pieces ran in the days after Chen Xiaojiang’s closing speech called for more “inviting in and going out” to show “the real Xinjiang.” (Xinjiang Daily, the regional party committee’s newspaper; Xinhua, July 2021)

Turkish and Chinese users trade insults on X, with the Uyghur homeland among the flashpoints. An exchange between Turkish- and Chinese-language accounts on X spread after a Chinese-language account posted on October 19 an image pairing Türkiye’s flag with a cartoon character, and Turkish users answered with jokes about the Great Wall, Türkiye Today, a Turkish English-language outlet, reported on October 22; the argument moved into history, with some posts invoking “East Turkestan” — the name used by two short-lived republics in the region in 1933–34 and 1944–49, led by Uyghur and other Turkic figures, which Chinese authorities treat as an expression of what they call “separatism” — and accounts presenting as Japanese, Spanish, Azerbaijani and Taiwanese joined in. Some Turkish users said “thousands” of replies came from apparently automated Chinese accounts; the outlet published no analysis of the accounts. The South China Morning Post, owned by Alibaba, headlined its October 25 account “war of words over Xinjiang.” (Türkiye Today; South China Morning Post, owned by Alibaba)

Unverified reports of Rahile Omer’s death spread on X. Posts in Chinese and Turkish on X since Saturday say that Rahile Omer, the youngest detainee identified in the Xinjiang Police Files, has died; the earliest widely shared version, posted October 24 by the account @LUOXIANGF, labels its own information “网传” — circulating online — and rests on a redacted screenshot of an anonymous Chinese-language post, with no named source, relative or record. The Xinjiang Victims Database, a documentation project run by researcher Gene Bunin, asked readers on Sunday not to repost the claim “until sourcing/verification become clear,” writing that the originating account “has no reputation” for reliable reporting on the region, “let alone specific victims.” Omer’s detention is documented: the police files leaked in 2022 and analyzed by a media consortium record her detention on September 28, 2017, at age 14, and a photograph taken in March 2018 at what authorities called a “vocational skills education and training center” in Konasheher (Shufu) county, Kashgar prefecture; the files say nothing about her after 2018. No outlet, rights organization or database had confirmed the death reports by Monday morning. The precedent is recent: in February 2019, after Turkey’s foreign ministry cited reports that the Uyghur musician Abdurehim Heyit had died in custody, China Radio International’s Turkish service released a video of Heyit saying he was alive, and Beijing used it for weeks to brand reporting on the region as lies — while the video itself showed a man who had been detained and said nothing about why. An unverified death claim hands the authorities that opening; a documented detention does not. Bunin is a member of the board of Uyghur Monitor, Közet’s publisher. (Xinjiang Victims Database; BBC, 2022 Xinjiang Police Files analysis)

ON THE RADAR

Ethnic-unity regulations: Publication of a draft of the regional implementing regulations, any consultation period and an adoption date. Sunday’s report supplies none.
Appointments: Names and posts from Sunday’s legislative session, and who takes over the political-legal commission.
Thailand: The National Security Council’s decision on the two pardoned Uyghur men. No date has been announced.
Beijing: The Central Committee’s fifth plenum, which Chen’s Friday meeting was framed around; the party has not announced its dates.
Maralbishi (Bachu): Whether the cotton-traceability presentation advertised for October 21–23 took place remains unconfirmed.

Radar is compiled by Közet’s editors from Közet’s own reporting, public documents and other outlets’ work, attributed in each item. Where Közet has read the underlying record, the item says so; where it could not verify a claim, the item says that too. Statements by governments and companies are reported as statements, not facts. Uyghur place names appear first, with the official Chinese name in parentheses. Published weekdays at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. Editorial standards and corrections: kozet.org/editorial-standards.