The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s top prosecutor’s office announced on Dec. 16 that Ren Hua, former vice chairwoman of the Xinjiang government, was arrested and would be prosecuted on bribery charges.
Ren has held many important positions in Xinjiang and worked with three other former high-ranking officials who have been arrested for corruption.
On Nov. 30, the Chinese regime announced that Ren was expelled from her post and the Party. Authorities accused her of corruption and “actively engaging in superstitious activities.”
Ren’s last public appearance was on May 27, 2020, when she attended the Xinjiang government’s official meeting, as reported by local state-run media Xinjiang Daily. On June 1, Ren was placed under investigation by the Party’s anti-corruption agency, the National Supervision Commission.
According to her official profile, Ren was born in March 1964 in Yantai city, Shandong Province. She has held official positions in Xinjiang for 34 years. In her career, she has worked with three “tigers,” or high-ranking CCP officials who have been taken down for corruption in recent years. They are: Yang Gang, former deputy director of the Economic Committee of the advisory body, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; Li Zhi, former deputy director of the Standing Committee in charge of Xinjiang’s rubber-stamp legislature; and Nur Bekri, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission.
In 2016, Yang was sentenced to 12 years in prison for taking bribes of 13.7928 million yuan (about $ 2.1 million). In the same year, Li was also sentenced to 12 years for taking bribes.
While serving as Xinjiang governor, Bekri promoted Beijing’s sinicization policies to restrict Uyghur customs and language while forcing locals to adopt customs of the Han ethnic majority.
Bekri also actively participated in the campaign to persecute Falun Gong adherents initiated by former CCP paramount leader Jiang Zemin and his security czar Zhou Yongkang.
From December 2000 to January 2005, Bekri was the deputy secretary of the Xinjiang branch of the Political and Legal Commission, a CCP agency that oversees the country’s security apparatus, including police, courts, and jails. The agency was in charge of the persecution of Falun Gong in Xinjiang. According to the statistics from Minghui.org, a website that documents the persecution in China, at least 34 Falun Gong practitioners have been tortured to death in Xinjiang.
The true figure is likely much higher due to the difficulty of verifying information from China.
The Party faction loyal to Jiang Zemin dominated Xinjiang politics for a long time. Bekri and Yang worked closely with the former party secretary of Xinjiang, Wang Lequan, who was in turn Zhou’s confidant.
After current Party leader Xi Jinping came to power, many Jiang faction officials have been sacked under a sweeping anti-corruption campaign.
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