BEIJING — A life sentence given to a moderate Chinese scholar Tuesday shows the ruling Communist Party is cutting off dialogue on ethnic tensions and could backfire by radicalizing minorities, scholars and analysts said.
A court found economics professor Ilham Tohti, an ethnic Uighur Muslim, guilty of separatism and sentenced him to life in prison. It was the most severe penalty in a decade for illegal political speech in China and eclipsed the 11-year jail sentence given Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo on subversion charges.
Ilham Tohti is seen as a moderate voice with ties to ethnic Uighurs and the Han Chinese majority. A Communist Party member and professor at Beijing’s Minzu University, he ran the website Uighur Online, which highlighted issues affecting the ethnic group.
The sentence of life imprisonment “is a very disturbing message, as the door to dialogue is closed because this scholar promoted dialogue between the Uighurs and the Chinese intellectuals,” said Willy Lam, a political analyst at the City University of Hong Kong.
China says it faces grave terror threats, particularly in Xinjiang, the ancestral home of Uighurs.
