The New Dominion

This is The New Dominion’s Society and Education News Roundup for March 26 - 30. In Urumqi, efforts to build a citywide educational computer network are coming to fruit, and counseling services are available to young residents, which is a good thing in light of the triple-decker crime busts carried out by the Urumqi police: this time its prostitution, murder-robbery, and drug smuggling.

The Urumqi Education Bureau is currently holding talks with China Telecom over plans to install a municipal computer network electronically linking all schools and providing a platform for greater information exchange and more concise education research. According to current plans, the Urumqi Education Bureau will use the next 3 to 5 years install the hardware inside the institutions of learning and the appropriate network links in between them. The network will serve practical concerns, enabling activities like the sharing of lesson plans, opinions, and material among teachers, as well as aid in addressing theoretical questions, enabling researchers to see and analyze grades, attendance, and other statistics in one unified database.

12355 “Youth Service Desks” have been opened to provide, among other services, “psychological counseling” to the city’s young residents. The employee at each service desk will handle questions and issues that can be handled immediately on the spot; for more complex questions the counsel-seeking youth will be directed to more professional level workers. Questions can be submitted to Youth Service workers through telephone and fax. Currently, work on text messaging and internet services is underway.

In light of the rising inflation plaguing Xinjiang in recent months, the Urumqi Education Bureau is going to add 20 Yuan to the monthly special living expenses stipend received by students within the Urumqi educational district.

Early this March city police officers succeeded in busting a prostitution operation that involved text messaging to solicit clients. The operation’s ringmaster was a certain Mr. Li who throughout the course of his dealings sent over 5000 text messages and made over 20,000 yuan of illegal income. Police observed that this is the first time in the past several years they have seen text messaging as a method to advertise services.

After an arduous 17 hour search operation conducted on the 19th, the Urumqi police successfully apprehended two suspects for the robbery-murder of a taxi driver that occurred only the day before on the 18th. Though the article mentions that detectives and forensics experts were deployed immediately upon receiving a report of a corpse in a taxi near a coal factory, it opts to omit any information from how the police went from that step to arresting the two suspects the next day. Interestingly, the article uses the standard procedure of taking a Mandarin Chinese name and masking it by replacing the person’s first name with 某, as in “a certain Mr. Li, 李某.” However, the two suspects in this case are 帕某 and 买某, with neither 帕 nor 买 being standard Mandarin last names, pointing to the conclusion that the two perpetrators were not Han. After arrest, the suspects admitted they planned the attack, boarded a taxi, asked the driver to take them to a place they knew was secluded, then after disembarking, they stabbed the driver, took his sell phone and over 400 yuan, and attempted to ignite the car (they failed) before fleeing.

On March 23, Urumqi police shattered a drug smuggling ring that involved transporting narcotics from Sichuan to Urumqi on long-distance passenger buses. During the bust, police seized 4500 grams of ketamine, 100 grams of meth, and 25 grams of ecstasy. In January, the Sha District Anti-Narcotics Division were investigating a certain Mr. Li they knew was peddling drugs on the streets of their district. After a 3 month investigation during which police tracked Li’s inter-province movements, plainclothes detectives found themselves shadowing Li after quietly boarding the bus at a toll station. After arriving at the destination, Li met up with a waiting minibus and dawdled a while before concluding the coast was clear and handing over the drugs. At this point, the police seized the narcotics and arrested all involved.