The Uygur teacher convicted of separatism had urged his students to fight the Chinese government by any means and manipulated opinion polls to preach the independence of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, according to detailed court records obtained by Xinhua on Wednesday.

The records came one day after the Intermediate People's Court of Urumqi sentenced Ilham Tohti, a former teacher with Beijing's Minzu University of China, to life imprisonment.

Preaching violence