Beijing: The Chinese government’s anti-Islam crackdown has expanded beyond the territory of Xinjiang, the largest concentration of Uyghurs amid US allegation of ‘genocide’ by the Communist authorities on members of predominantly Turkic-speaking ethnic group primarily in China’s northwestern region.
Apart from being detained, Uyghurs in the region have been kept under intense surveillance, forced labour, and involuntary sterilisations, among other rights abuses.
A Human Rights Watch report said authorities have shut down mosques in the northern Ningxia region as well as Gansu province, which are home to large populations of Hui Muslims.
The authorities called the process ‘consolidation’, the report that cites public documents, satellite images, and witness testimonies said.
The latest crackdown is considered part of the ‘Sinicization’ process, ordered by President Xi Jinping in 2016, under which Muslims in China are brought under draconian tenets of the Communist regime. Authorities ordered change of architectural features of mosques to make them look more ‘Chinese’ in a campaign by the ruling Communist Party to tighten its grip over religion and reduce the risk of possible challenges to its rule.
The more than 11 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the Western part of China are mainly targeted by the authorities under the plan. Last year’s UN report also raised grave concern over “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang, where extrajudicial internment camps are allegedly keeping at least 1 million Uyghurs, Huis, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz.
Mosque demolition
Chinese authorities’ demolition and conversation drive of mosques for secular use is not only confined to regions outside Xinjiang. The Human Rights Watch report says the campaign is going on in other parts of China as well though the Chinese Foreign Ministry remains tightlipped over such actions.
‘Xinjiang Papers,’ a Communist party internal document leaked to the US media in 2018, revealed the horrors of the ‘Sinicisation’ drive carried out in China.
The official document showed the Communist government’s clear instructions to state agencies to stop activities, which the authorities deemed as detrimental to the values of the Communist belief system. According to instructions, agencies were asked to “compress the overall number (of mosques).”
The government’s action evokes criticism from Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch. “The Chinese government’s crackdown on Muslims through destruction and remodeling of mosques is nothing but a systematic effort to curb the practice of Islam in China.”
Citing such an instance, she says in Liaoqiao and Chuankou villages in Ningxia, authorities razed the domes and minarets of all seven mosques and dismantled the main buildings of three of them between 2019 and 2021.
Videos and pictures posted online and corroborated with satellite imagery by the group’s researchers confirmed the crackdown, she says.
The policy of “consolidating mosques” was also referenced in a March 2018 document issued by the government of Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia. According to the paper, the government wanted to “strictly control the number and scale of religious venues” and called for mosques to adopt “Chinese architecture styles.”.The paper suggested the “integration and combination of mosques” could “solve the problem of too many religious venues.” In Gansu province, several local governments have detailed efforts to “consolidate” mosques.
In Guanghe County, where the majority of the population is Hui, authorities in 2020 “cancelled the registration of 12 mosques, closed down five mosques and improved and consolidated another five,” according to the government’s annual yearbook, referenced in the Human Rights Watch report. News reports also suggest the Chinese government has closed or altered mosques in other places around the country, occasionally facing public backlash. In May, protesters in Nagu town in southern Yunnan province clashed with police over the planned demolition of a mosque’s dome.