Uighur Muslims accusing China of religious and cultural repression

Arrests skyrocketed by more than 730 percent last year in China's far-western Xinjiang as the government ramped up a security crackdown in the traditionally Muslim region, activists said Wednesday.

Many Muslims in the region accuse Beijing of religious and cultural repression.

Authorities in Xinjiang arrested nearly 228,000 people on criminal charges in 2017, according to data compiled from official government sources by rights group China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).

That's around 21 percent of all arrests in China last year, the group said, even though the sparsely populated region has only around 1.5 percent of China's nearly 1.4 billion population.

The dramatic increase in arrests followed the introduction of draconian new restrictions on religious practices in Xinjiang, where about half the population of around 22 million are ethnic minorities.

"Though the government does not provide the data disaggregated by ethnicity, criminal punishment would disproportionately target the Uighur Muslim group based on their percentage of the population," CHRD wrote.

The report drew on public data released by Chinese prosecutor's offices at the national and local levels.

Indictments in Xinjiang also increased at a rate "far out of proportion" to its population, amounting to a 422 percent increase year-on-year in 2017, it said.

The increases follow significant drops in both statistics in 2016, when arrests fell by 20 percent and indictments by 15 percent, respectively.

China's legal system has a conviction rate of over 99.9 percent, virtually guaranteeing any indictment will end in a conviction.

Civil unrest and clashes with government forces have killed hundreds more.

In March, local authorities introduced stringent new restrictions on religious practices, forbidding beards and the wearing of veils and the distribution of "extremist" religious content including everything from songs with Arabic lyrics to unofficial editions of the Koran.

Members of the Uighur diaspora say relatives have been arrested for seemingly innocuous acts such as sending Ramadan greetings to friends or downloading popular music.

The local government pumped more than 58 billion yuan ($9 billion) into security spending in 2017, nearly double the year before, according to Adrian Zenz, a China security expert at Germany's European School of Culture and Theology.

It also flooded the region with tens of thousands of security personnel, Zenz's research has shown.