in protest against repressive policies, bringing the known number of self-immolations since February 2009 to 152. On 18 March, Pema Gyaltsen set himself on fire in Ganzi (Tibetan: Kardze) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. Tibetan sources said that he was believed to be alive when he was taken away by the police. His relatives were detained and beaten when they approached the authorities asking for his whereabouts. Tibetan NGOs abroad said that Lobsang Kunchok, a Tibetan monk detained after surviving a self-immolation attempt in 2011, was released from prison in March.8 On 26 December, Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen was reunited with his family in the USA, almost 10 years after he was first detained in China for making an independent documentary about the views of ordinary Tibetans ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. XINJIANG UIGHUR AUTONOMOUS REGION Under the leadership of new regional Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) authorities put new emphasis on “social stability” and increased security. Media reports indicated that numerous detention facilities were set up within the XUAR, variously called “counter extremism centres”, “political study centres”, or “education and transformation centres”, in which people were arbitrarily detained for unspecified periods and forced to study Chinese laws and policies. In March, the XUAR enacted the “Deextremification Regulation” that prohibits a wide range of behaviours labelled “extremist”, such as spreading “extremist thought”, denigrating or refusing to watch public radio and TV programmes, wearing burkas, having an “abnormal” beard, resisting national policies, and publishing, downloading, storing or reading articles, publications or audio-visual materials containing “extremist content”. In April, the government published a list of prohibited names, most of which were Amnesty International Report 2017/18 Islamic in origin, and required all children under 16 with these names to change them. In May, there were media reports that the Chinese authorities in the XUAR had initiated a policy to compel all Uighurs studying abroad to return to China. Six Uighurs who had studied in Turkey but had returned to the XUAR were given prison sentences ranging from 5 to 12 years on undefined charges. In April, Chinese authorities detained relatives of several students in Egypt to coerce them to return home by May. Reports were received that some who returned were tortured and imprisoned. In July, the Egyptian authorities began a massive round-up of hundreds of Chinese nationals in Egypt, mainly Uighurs. Of these, at least 22 Uighurs were forcibly returned to China. Buzainafu Abudourexiti, a Uighur woman who returned to China in 2015 after studying for two years in Egypt, was detained in March and sentenced in June to seven years’ imprisonment after a secret trial.9 In August, international media reported that education authorities had issued an order in June in the largely Uighur-populated Hotan Prefecture to ban the use of the Uighur language in schools, including for “collective activities, public activities and management work of the education system”. Media reports stated that families across the region were required to hand copies of the Qur’an and any other religious items to the authorities or risk punishment. HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION A series of actions taken throughout the year by the Hong Kong authorities increased concerns about whether freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly were at risk. In March, the founders of the Occupy Central campaign – Benny Tai, Chan Kinman and Rev Chu Yiu-Ming – were charged with “public nuisance”-related offences, carrying a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment, for their involvement in the Umbrella Movement. 129