October 2010

The sun won’t set on Kashgar for another three hours, but inside the Padiqi disco night is well underway. In the dark, it’s difficult to see faces among the steady stream of young Uighur men and women, mostly teenagers, pouring in past the waiters done up in leather cowboy hats, offering bottled iced teas and cold sodas to the patrons.

The continuing unrest among Tibetan students in the Qinghai province over the introduction of Mandarin as the medium of instruction shows no signs of subsiding, though it has not taken a violent form and the number of those involved in different protest demonstrations is less than 10,000.

On Monday, October 18, 2010, the Nonviolent Radical Party Transnational and Transparty, an NGO in consultative status to the United Nations, orally delivered an intervention concerning linguistic discrimination as a form of structural discrimination during the Eighth Session of the UN Human Rights Council's Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland.

American policy toward China should reflect a more principled, high-profile approach to human rights in China, said a group of human rights advocates and China experts in a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.