China vs. Islam: China's mission to raze the mosques of East Turkestan

Guardian and Bellingcat investigation finds more than two dozen Islamic religious sites completely demolished since 2016
By Lily Kuo in Beijing

Keriya Aitika mosque in November 2018. The gatehouse and dome have been removed, part of China’s destruction of mosques in East Turkestan. 

Around this time of the year, the edge of the Taklamakan desert in far western China should be overflowing with people.
For decades, every spring thousands of Uighur Muslims would converge on the Imam Asim shrine, a group of buildings and fences surrounding a small mud tomb believed to contain the remains of a holy warrior from the eighth century.
Pilgrims from across the Hotan oasis would come seeking healing, fertility, and absolution, trekking through the sand in the footsteps of those ahead of them. It was one of the largest shrine festivals in the region.
People left offerings and tied pieces of cloth to branches, markers of their prayers.
Visiting a sacred shrine three times, it was believed, was as good as completing the hajj, a journey many in underdeveloped southern East Turkestan could not afford.
But this year, the Imam Asim shrine is empty.
Its mosque, khaniqah, a place for Sufi rituals, and other buildings have been torn down, leaving only the tomb.
The offerings and flags have disappeared.
Pilgrims no longer visit.
It is one of more than two dozen Islamic religious sites that have been completely demolished in East Turkestan since 2016, according to an investigation by the Guardian and open-source journalism site Bellingcat that offers new evidence of large-scale mosque razing in the Chinese colony where Muslim minorities suffer severe religious repression.
Using satellite imagery, the Guardian and Bellingcat open-source analyst Nick Waters checked the locations of 100 mosques and shrines identified by former residents, researchers, and crowdsourced mapping tools.
Out of 91 sites analysed, 31 mosques and two major shrines, including the Imam Asim complex and another site, suffered significant structural damage between 2016 and 2018.
Of those, 15 mosques and both shrines appear to have been completely or almost completely razed. The rest of the damaged mosques had gatehouses, domes, and minarets removed.
A further nine locations identified by former East Turkestan residents as mosques, but where buildings did not have obvious indicators of being a mosque such as minarets or domes, also appeared to have been destroyed.

China’s is waging hi-tech war on its Muslim minority 

Uprooted, broken, desecrated
In the name of containing religious extremism, China has overseen an intensifying state campaign of mass surveillance and policing of Muslim minorities — many of them Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking group that often have more in common with their Central Asian neighbours than their Han Chinese compatriots.
As many as 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims have been sent to concentration camps.
Authorities have bulldozed hundreds, possibly thousands of mosques as part of the campaign. 
But a lack of records of these sites — many are small village mosques and shrines — difficulties police give journalists and researchers traveling independently in East Turkestan, and widespread surveillance of residents have made it difficult to confirm reports of their destruction.
The locations found by the Guardian and Bellingcat corroborate previous reports as well as signal a new escalation in the current security clampdown: the razing of shrines. 
While closed years ago, major shrines have not been previously reported as demolished.
The destruction of shrines that were once sites of mass pilgrimages, a key practice for Uighur Muslims, represent a new form of assault on their culture.

Three-way composite of Jafari Sadiq shrine.

“The images of Imam Asim in ruins are quite shocking. For the more devoted pilgrims, they would be heartbreaking,” said Rian Thum, a historian of Islam at the University of Nottingham.
Before the crackdown, pilgrims also trekked 70km into the desert to reach the Jafari Sadiq shrine, honouring Jafari Sadiq, a holy warrior whose spirit was believed to have travelled to East Turkestan to help bring Islam to the region.
The tomb, on a precipice in the desert, appears to have been torn down in March 2018.
Buildings for housing the pilgrims in a nearby complex are also gone, according to satellite imagery captured this month.

Before and after imagery of the Jafari Sadiq shrine. L-R Dec 10 2013, April 20, 2019. 

“Nothing could say more clearly to the Uighurs that the Chinese state wants to uproot their culture and break their connection to the land than the desecration of their ancestors’ graves, the sacred shrines that are the landmarks of Uighur history,” said Thum.

‘When they grow up, this will be foreign to them’
The Kargilik mosque, at the centre of the old town of Kargilik in southern East Turkestan, was the largest mosque in the area.
People from various villages gathered there every week.
Visitors remember its tall towers, impressive entryway, and flowers and trees that formed an indoor garden.
The mosque, previously identified by online activist Shawn Zhang, appears to have been almost completely razed at some point in 2018, with its gatehouse and other buildings removed, according to satellite images analysed by the Guardian and Bellingcat.
Three locals, staff at nearby restaurants and a hotel, told the Guardian that the mosque had been torn down within the last half year.
“It is gone. It was the biggest in Kargilik,” one restaurant worker said.
Another major community mosque, the Yutian Aitika mosque near Hotan, appears to have been removed in March of last year.
As the largest in its district, locals would gather here on Islamic festivals.
The mosque’s history dates back to 1200.
Despite being included on a list of national historical and cultural sites, its gatehouse and other buildings were removed in late 2018, according to satellite images analysed by Zhang and confirmed by Waters.
The demolished buildings were likely structures that had been renovated in the 1990s.
Two local residents who worked near the mosque, the owner of a hotel and a restaurant employee, told the Guardian the mosque had been torn down.
One resident said she had heard the mosque would be rebuilt but smaller, to make room for new shops.
“Many mosques are gone. In the past, in every village like in Yutian county would have had one,” said a Han Chinese restaurant owner in Yutian, who estimated that as much as 80% had been torn down.
“Before, mosques were places for Muslims to pray, have social gatherings. In recent years, they were all cancelled. It’s not only in Yutian, but the whole Hotan area, It’s all the same … it’s all been corrected,” he said.
The destruction of these historical sites is a way to assimilate the next generation of Uighurs. 
According to former residents, most Uighurs in East Turkestan had already stopped going to mosques, which are often equipped with surveillance systems.
Most require visitors to register their IDs.
Mass shrine festivals like the one at Imam Asim had been stopped for years.
Removing the structures, critics said, would make it harder for young Uighurs growing up in China to remember their distinctive background.
“If the current generation, you take away their parents and on the other hand you destroy the cultural heritage that reminds them of their origin... when they grow up, this will be foreign to them,” said a former resident of Hotan, referring to the number of Uighurs believed detained in camps, many of them separated from their families for months, sometimes years.

Imam Asim shrine festival 2010. 

“Mosques being torn down is one of the few things we can see physically. What other things are happening that are hidden, that we don’t know about? That is what is scary,” he said.

The ‘sinicisation’ of Islam

A demolished mosque in the old town of Kashgar, East Turkestan. 

Beijing is open about its goal of “sinicising” religions like Islam and Christianity to better fit China’s “national conditions”.
In January, China passed a five-year plan to “guide Islam to be compatible with socialism”.
In a speech in late March, party secretary Chen Quanguo who has overseen the crackdown since 2016 said the government in East Turkestan must “improve the conditions of religious places to guide “religion and socialism to adapt to each other”.
Removing Islamic buildings or features is one way of doing that.
“The Islamic architecture of East Turkestan, closely related to Indian and Central Asian styles, puts on public display the region’s links to the wider Islamic world,” said David Brophy, a historian of East Turkestan at the University of Sydney.
“Destroying this architecture serves to smooth the path for efforts to shape a new ‘sinicised’ Uighur Islam.”
The razing of religious sites marks a return to extreme practices not seen since the Cultural Revolution when mosques and shrines were burned, or in the 1950s when major shrines were turned into museums as a way to desacralise them.
Today, officials describe any changes to mosques as an effort to “improve” them.
In East Turkestan, various policies to update the mosques include adding electricity, roads, news broadcasts, radios and televisions, “cultural bookstores,” and toilets.
Another includes equipping mosques with computers, air conditioning units, and lockers.
“That is code to allow them to demolish places that they deem to be in the way of progress or unsafe, to progressively yet steadily try to eradicate many of the places of worship for Uighurs and Muslim minorities,” said James Leibold, an associate professor at La Trobe University focusing on ethnic relations.
Authorities are trying to remove even the history of the shrines.
Rahile Dawut, a prominent Uighur academic who documented shrines across East Turkestan, disappeared in 2017.
Her former colleagues and relatives believe she has been detained because of her work preserving Uighur traditions.
Dawut said in an interview in 2012: “If one were to remove these … shrines, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. They would no longer have a personal, cultural, and spiritual history. After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.”

A Chinese Hero: Brenton Tarrant

Brenton Tarrant finds support in China's Islamophobic propaganda
By Isabella Steger & Echo Huang

Xi Jinping's most famous fan

Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian gunman who carried out the deadly mosque shooting in New Zealand on Friday (March 15), said in his screed that “the nation with the closest political and social values” to his own is China, and that he admired “non-diverse” nations.
While Tarrant, who now faces one charge of murder, didn’t elaborate on his views of China, his hatred of Islam certainly has support from corners of China’s internet.
One anonymous post (link in Chinese) on social network WeChat titled “The words on the New Zealand shooter’s guns reflect the deep anxiety of European white men”—a reference to the white supremacy markings on Tarrant’s rifles, and his grievances over Muslim immigration to western countries—has garnered at least 100,000 views at the time of writing, the maximum number of views on a post displayed by the platform. 

The piece lays blame on Christchurch officials for allowing the construction of mosques, and claimed this resulted in more Muslims coming to the city. 

It even alleged that the shooting was staged by left-wing politicians.
Some of the comments under the post suggest that followers of the “green religion“—a sometimes derogatory term often used on the Chinese internet to refer to Islam because of the significance of the color to the faith—brought the attack upon themselves. 

“The green religion launches terrorist attacks everywhere, and now the attack finally comes to them… Green religion is backwards, stupid, barbaric, and violent,” said one such comment.
Elsewhere, on social network Weibo, many comments reflected the view that the shooting was a by-product of the West’s excessive political correctness, a perspective that has found increasing support on China’s internet in recent years as part of what’s known as the baizuo, or “white left” movement, a derogatory term used to describe Western progressives that is roughly analogous to the term “social justice warrior.”
One Weibo user wrote (link in Chinese), “This is a rare act of resistance from a white man. We need to find a way to prolong this and encourage white men to apply for all kinds of honors for the gunman, including a Nobel peace prize.” 
Another wrote (link in Chinese) that “this so-called ‘darkest day‘ is simply political correctness. A reminder to the "greens": not everyone is willing to tolerate your outrageous actions.”
The comment was a reference to remarks by New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who said the attack would be remembered as one of the country’s darkest days.
Anti-Islam sentiment has become widespread in China amid resentment over what some believe to be preferential government policies toward minorities, as well as over attacks carried out by a handful of Muslim Uyghurs from the country’s far west.
One prominent expression of it is in comments about “halalification,” as people express their anger that offering halal products could undermine China’s unity.
A decision last year by one of the country’s biggest food-delivery apps, Meituan, to offer halal food packaging drew an outcry from people in China who said the practice was discriminatory against non-Muslims, as did a Beijing university’s move to offer halal mooncakes at its celebration of the Mid-Autumn festival.
Another indicator of that sentiment is the extraordinary popularity of the Israeli embassy’s account on Weibo, which last year ranked as the foreign mission with the most followers on the social network, according to a study last year by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
The reason for the embassy’s popularity is that its followers in China see its account as an outlet for sharing Islamophobic comments. 
One of the most liked comments under a Weibo post by the Israeli embassy on the US relocating its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was “Put the boot into the cancer of humanity”—a reference to Muslims.
The rise of Islamophobia on China’s internet comes against a backdrop of the government’s intensifying crackdown on the country’s 23 million Muslims. 
Most of China’s Muslims are Turkic Uyghurs in East Turkestan, but another minority known as the Hui, who belong to the dominant Han ethnicity in China, live in the Ningxia autonomous region and have long been regarded as well-assimilated, model Muslims.
In January, China passed a new law that could rewrite how Islam is practiced in the country.
China has in recent years constructed large-scale concentration camps in East Turkestan where 1.5 million Muslims are incarcerated, while those living outside the camps are subject to unprecedented levels of surveillance in an ever-growing police state.
China has likened those camps to “boarding schools” or training institutes, and says its measures are necessary in order to preventive radicalization of Muslims and to thwart "terrorist" attacks—an argument which has widespread support in China, following attacks carried out by a group of Uyghurs in Kunming in 2014 which killed 31.
Beijing’s suppression of Islam has also extended to the Hui minority, where reports say that authorities are snuffing out Arabic and Islamic symbols and practices.

Axis of Islamophobia

Call for Rohingya Genocide Prosecution to Deepen China’s Support of Myanmar Massacres
By Josh Chin

Axis of islamophobia: Aung San Suu Kyi meeting with Xi Jinping in 2017.

BEIJING—A recommendation by investigators that Myanmar’s military leaders be prosecuted for genocide over their campaign against Rohingya Muslims is dragging China into another fight at the United Nations.

For Beijing, that could be a good thing.
The investigators’ report, released this week by the U.N.’s human-rights agency, gives China a fresh chance to shelter Myanmar’s military and political leaders from international pressure, drawing them further into Beijing’s orbit as the U.S. retreats from the region, analysts say.
“The Rohingya crisis really creates an opportunity” for China with Myanmar, said Yun Sun, an expert on Myanmar-China relations at the Washington-based Stimson Center. 

“Now’s the time to show them who their real friends are.”
For the friendship, Beijing expects to secure access for its companies to a resource-rich neighbor on the Indian Ocean and a strategic partner in efforts to tamp down criticism of China’s more muscular exercise of power in the region.
The U.S. and other Western nations accuse China and Russia of using their veto power in the U.N. Security Council to scuttle punitive action against Myanmar for a campaign of violence that since last year drove Rohingya to flee en mass. 

When Sweden and the Netherlands called on Tuesday for the Security Council to refer Myanmar’s military commanders to the International Criminal Court, China and Russia urged patient diplomacy.
“Unilateral accusation or pressure will not help to solve the problem,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular news briefing on Tuesday. 

The potential payoff for China’s leaders is worth the risk of being accused of shielding war criminals, according to analysts. 

An immediate positive is keeping the U.N. from interfering in problems along China’s border and thereby making Beijing a peacemaker.
Rebel groups with ethnic and commercial ties to China have been battling the Myanmar military for decades, and Beijing would like to see the conflicts resolved on its terms. 

“The entry point is that there shouldn’t be any international interference in ethnic conflicts in Myanmar, because that might affect what’s happening at the border,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s East Asia director.
Myanmar also occupies an important role in Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road plan to build infrastructure and deepen trade ties throughout Eurasia. 

A critical piece of Xi’s plan is a multibillion-dollar China-Myanmar Economic Corridor anchored by an Indian Ocean port at Kyaukpyu, in the Rohingyas’ home state of Rakhine.
Authorities in Myanmar are pressing to scale back the port project, worried it could leave the country too heavily indebted to China, and no agreement has been reached about the rest of the corridor, expected to consist of new roads, high-speed rail lines and industrial zones.
“Beijing has a long wish list in Myanmar,” said Elliot Brennan, a nonresident research fellow at the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm. 

While Myanmar’s leaders are wary of China and may resist concessions on the biggest projects, “an acceptable, if unpalatable, quid pro quo for its support will certainly be found,” he said.

More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, including to this refugee camp in Cox's Bazar. 

Beijing played diplomatic protector for Myanmar in the previous decade when the country was isolated and its military leadership was shunned by the West for resisting democracy and confining Aung San Suu Kyi, then an opposition leader who had won a Nobel Peace Prize.
The Myanmar junta eventually became leery of China’s sway. 

With political reforms and Suu Kyi’s release, Myanmar began to court Western nations and multinationals, eclipsing Beijing.
Still, China remains Myanmar’s largest trading partner, and, according to Myanmar government statistics, Chinese companies are responsible for roughly a quarter of Myanmar’s foreign direct investment.
China’s government has worked to rekindle the political relationship, including hosting a visit last year by Suu Kyi, now Myanmar’s de facto leader who came in for blame in the U.N. report for failing to use her position and moral authority to stop the violence.
More than anything, according to Ms. Sun of the Stimson Center, patching up ties with Myanmar’s military and civilian leaders allows China to regain regional prestige befitting an emerging superpower.
“There’s almost a psychology of revenge,” after Myanmar was coaxed away by the West, Ms. Sun said. 

“The mentality in China is, ‘Myanmar is right on our border. If we can’t take care of them, then who are we?’”

China vs. Islam

Muslim children forced to drop religious names: Names such as Islam, Quran and Mecca must be changed amid pro-Communist rallies.
By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Worshippers leave Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque in Xinjiang during Ramadan. 

Muslim children in China’s far western Xinjiang region are being forced to change their “religious” names and adults are being coerced into attending rallies showing devotion to the officially atheist Communist party.
During Ramadan, the authorities in Xinjiang have ordered all children under 16 to change names where police have determined they are “overly religious”. 

As many as 15 names have been banned, including Islam, Quran, Mecca, Jihad, Imam, Saddam, Hajj, Medina and Arafat.

China bans religious names for Muslims in Xinjiang
In April authorities banned certain names for newborns that were deemed to have religious connotations, but the new order expands forced name changes to anyone under 16, the age at which Chinese citizens are issued a national identity card.
The order coincided with millions gathering at 50,000 individual rallies across Xinjiang this week to pledge allegiance to the Communist party. 

More than a quarter of the region’s population sang the national anthem at 9am on 29 May and pledged allegiance to the Communist party, according to state media reports.
Xinjiang’s Muslims mostly belonging to the Uighur ethnic group, a Turkic people. 

The region has occasionally seen sporadic violence which China blames on international terrorist groups. 

But overseas observers say the vast majority of incidents are a result of local grievances.
“Terrorists are the scum of the Uighur people, they are the common enemies of the people of all ethnic groups,” said a Communist party cadre leading one of the rallies in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. 

“We must treat the enemy harshly and brush away the old to make a clean sweep, we should raise our swords high and in no way be lenient.”
State media accounts of the mass rallies gave no indication as to a reason for the sudden display of patriotism. 

Photos of some rallies showed paramilitary troops in full body armour armed with assault rifles attending the ceremony.
“Fundamentally these rallies are just a show of force, and part of the audience is the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang, to show the power of the state,” said Michael Clarke, a political science professor at the Australian National University and expert on Xinjiang. 

“But in terms of the Uighur population, it’s difficult to see how these kinds of mass rallies will win the hearts and minds over average Uighurs, and will likely do quite the opposite.”
Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, is more than 3,000km away from Beijing.
Human rights groups accuse China of restricting Uighurs’ freedom of religion and expression and authorities routinely deny passports to members of the ethnic group. 

The government has also encourages mass migration by Han Chinese to the area and they now make up roughly 45% of the population.
Xinjiang has seen an increasingly invasive security state since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, Clarke added, including hiring thousands of police.
The region is at the centre of Xi’s Belt and Road initiative, a $900bn development aimed at building closer ties within Asia and beyond by constructing large-scale infrastructure.
In recent months authorities began confiscating Qur’ans published before August 2012, declaring them illegal for containing “extremist content”, according to a report by US-funded Radio Free Asia.
On the same day as the mass rallies, officials in Xinjiang announced they had expelled a Communist party member for attending religious activities at a local mosque. 

It was not clear if the man was a government official or simply a private citizen who was also a party member.
Rules announced last year also forbid retired officials from attending religious ceremonies and ban them from holding beliefs.

China vs. Islam

China bans list of Islamic names
AP

In this Thursday, May 1, 2014 file photo, an Uighur woman carries a toddler as children play near a cage protecting heavily armed Chinese paramilitary policemen on duty in East Turkestan.

BEIJING – Authorities in western China are prohibiting parents from naming their children Islamic names in the latest effort to dilute the influence of religion on life in the ethnic Uighur minority heartland.
"Muhammad," ''Jihad" and "Islam" are among at least 29 names now banned in the heavily Muslim region, according to a list distributed by overseas Uighur activists.
If a parent chooses one of the barred names, the child will be denied government benefits.
The names listed on the government document disseminated by Uighur groups include several related to historic religious or political figures and some place names.
"Imam," ''Hajj," ''Turknaz," ''Azhar" and "Wahhab" are on the list, as are "Saddam," ''Arafat," Medina" and "Cairo."

Judgment calls about which names are deemed to be "overly religious" will be made by local government officials, according to Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-funded radio service which first reported the naming directive.
An official at a county-level public security office said names were banned because they had a "religious background." 

It is unclear how widespread the ban is or whether it is tightly enforced. 

The official refused to identify herself, as is common with Chinese officials.
The naming restrictions are part of a broader government effort to secularize East Turkestan, which is home to roughly 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic people who mostly follow Sunni Islam.
Top officials including Xinjiang (East Turkestan)'s Communist Party chief have publicly said that radical Islamic thought has infiltrated the region from Central Asia, protracting a bloody, yearslong insurgency that has claimed hundreds of lives.
Government-linked scholars and high-ranking officials, including Xi Jinping, have urged local governments to better assimilate their Muslim minorities into the majority Han Chinese culture, and many ethnic policy hard-liners have decried a trend of so-called "Arabization" affecting China's 21 million Muslims.
Aside from the prohibition on Islamic names, local Xinjiang (East Turkestan) officials have prohibited Islamic veils, while government-linked commentators have called for bans of mosques with domes or other Middle Eastern architectural styles.
Uighur activists and human rights groups say that radical thought had never gained widespread traction, but restrictions on religious expression are fueling a cycle of radicalization and violence.
For instance, "Mehmet," the widely seen Turkic version of "Muhammad," is considered "mainstream" in Xinjiang and would likely be permitted, RFA reported.
Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the overseas World Uighur Congress activist group, called the naming directive a policy bearing a "hostile attitude" toward Uighurs.
"Han parents choosing Western names are considered trendy but Uighurs have to accept Chinese regulations or else be accused of being separatists or terrorists," Raxit said.

China vs. Islam: China bans religious names for Muslim babies

List of banned baby names released amid ongoing crackdown on religion that includes law against veils and beards
By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Uighur women in loose, full-length garments and headscarves associated with conservative Islam visit a market in the city of Aksu in East Turkestan.

Many couples fret over choosing the perfect name for their newborn, but for Muslims in western China that decision has now become even more fraught: pick the wrong name and your child will be denied education and government benefits.
Officials in the western region of Xinjiang (East Turkestan), home to roughly half of China’s 23 million Muslims, have released a list of banned baby names amid an ongoing crackdown on religion.

Chinese troops stage show of force in Xinjiang and vow to 'relentlessly beat' separatists

Names such as Islam, Quran, Saddam and Mecca, as well as references to the star and crescent moon symbol, are all unacceptable to the ruling Communist party and children with those names will be denied household registration, a crucial document that grants access to social services, healthcare and education.
A full list of names has not yet been published and it is unclear exactly what qualifies as a religious name.
China blames religious extremists for a slew of violent incidents in recent years that have left hundreds dead. 

It has launched a series of crackdowns in Xinjiang (East Turkestan), home to the Muslim Uighur minority and one of the most militarised regions in the country.
Uighur rights groups complain of severe restrictions on religion and freedom of expression, and say the attacks are isolated incidents caused by local grievances, not part of a wider coordinated campaign. 

Young men are banned from growing beards in Xinjiang and women are forbidden from wearing face veils.
Rights groups were quick to condemn the name ban, which applies to dozens of names deemed by Communist party officials to carry religious overtones.
“This is just the latest in a slew of new regulations restricting religious freedom in the name of countering ‘religious extremism,’” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. 

“These policies are blatant violations of domestic and international protections on the rights to freedom of belief and expression.
“If the government is serious about bringing stability and harmony to the region as it claims, it should roll back – not double down on – repressive policies.”
Authorities in Xinjiang (East Turkestan) passed new legislation last month expanding a host of restrictions, including allowing staff at train stations and airports to deny entry to women wearing face veils and encouraging staff to report them to the police.
The new law also prohibits “abnormal beards” and “naming of children to exaggerate religious fervour”. 

Various cities in Xinjiang previously had rules banned women wear face veils and men with long beard from public transportation, but the new law applies to the entire region.
A Communist party village chief and ethnic Uighur was demoted last month for not having a “resolute political stance” after he refused to smoke in front of Muslim elders. 

The state-run Global Times newspaper quote another local official as saying cadres should push against religious convention to demonstrate “their commitment to secularisation”.