China's War On Islam

'Afraid We Will Become The Next East Turkestan': China's Hui Muslims Face Crackdown
By EMILY FENG

Chinese-style tile has replaced the domes and domed minarets of the Hongsibao Mosque in China's Ningxia region. Ningxia is home to a large concentration of Hui Muslims, who have long prided themselves on assimilation but are under increasing scrutiny by Chinese authorities.

Gold-domed mosques and gleaming minarets once broke the monotony of the Ningxia region's vast scrubland every few miles. 

This countryside here is home to some of China's 10.5 million Hui Muslims, who have practiced Sunni or Sufi forms of Islam within tight-knit communities for centuries, mainly in the northwest and central plains. 

Concentrated in the Ningxia region, the Hui are China's third-largest ethnic minority.
Now, though, virtually every mosque in Ningxia's countryside has been denuded of its domes, part of a sweeping crackdown on China's Muslim minorities that has reached Hui strongholds in Ningxia, in central China, and as far inland as Henan province in the east. (Up to now, Gansu province in central China has been able to keep most of its mosques intact.)
The crackdown on Muslims has been most extreme in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan, where scholars estimate that up to 1.5 million Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking group, and other ethnic minorities have been detained since 2016, in one of the most sophisticated surveillance states in the world.
The same restrictions that preceded the East Turkestan crackdown on Uighur Muslims are now appearing in Hui-dominated regions. 

NPR has learned that since April 2018, Hui mosques have been forcibly renovated or shuttered, schools demolished and religious community leaders imprisoned. 

Hui who have traveled internationally are increasingly detained or sent to reeducation facilities in East Turkestan.
In August 2018, in Ningxia's Tongxin county, authorities attempted to demolish the Weizhou Grand Mosque, claiming it lacked the right building permits. 

Hundreds of furious residents staged a sit-in, sharing videos of their protest through popular Chinese social media platforms like WeChat and Kuaishou, a live-streaming app, faster than censors could take them down.
Taken aback, officials called off the demolition. 

But the victory was short-lived. 

In November, local government work units began visiting every household in Weizhou, pressuring residents to sign letters stating their acquiescence to "renovate" the mosque by removing its main dome and domed minarets. 

In some cases, Weizhou officials threatened to fire state employees if they did not sign the letter, according to multiple residents.
This month, NPR drove through Weizhou, which is now guarded by checkpoints on the only road leading in and out of town. 

The mosque is closed, its main dome and minarets replaced with tiled Buddhist-style pagodas, and its entrances blocked by scaffolding.

The domes and minarets of the Weizhou Grand Mosque in Ningxia have been replaced with tiled pagodas, NPR found in a visit this month to Weizhou.

"Of course we are afraid we will become the next East Turkestan," one Hui man told NPR. 

He did not provide his name for fear that authorities in East Turkestan would find him. 

Three years ago, he abandoned his family's property in East Turkestan in order to transfer his residency to Tongxin county. 

"But what can an individual do? We can only take it year by year."

"We say what we have to say"
Descendants of Arab traders who entered China some 1,500 years ago, the Hui pride themselves on having thoroughly assimilated into Chinese society. 

Unlike the Uighurs, the Hui have no distinct language, speaking Mandarin and often some Arabic. Save for the occasional white cap customarily worn by Hui men or hair coverings among women, they are often visually indistinguishable from China's ethnic majority, the Han.
Their exemption from the harshest of religious restrictions changed in April 2018, when the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department formally took control of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs — meaning that the party now directly oversees policy for religious affairs, not the government.
"The day-to-day responsibility for managing religious activities and organizations shifted to the UFWD, and its atheist party apparatchiks, whose overarching mission is the protection of party power," James Leibold, an associate professor at Australia's La Trobe University and an expert on China's ethnic minority policy, tells NPR via email.
That same April, a mass dome-removal campaign began in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province in central China, and resumed in Ningxia as part of the official effort known as chu shahua, fan ah'hua, to "combat Saudi and Arabic influence."
All Hui-run nursery schools, child care centers and religious schools were forcibly closed in Ningxia and across Yunnan and Henan provinces, which are also home to a large number of Hui Muslims.

Plans for "renovation" of the Gongmazhuang mosque outside Zhengzhou city in Henan province include removing its domes.

The United Front's new control over Chinese ethnic and religious policy marks a substantial change, says Leibold. 

While the State Bureau of Religious Affairs was sometimes restrictive, it at least "saw the protection, if not promotion, of 'normal religious activities' as part of their mission and mandate, and many of its officials were religious practitioners themselves," he says in his email to NPR.
Abroad, the United Front is the party body that liaises with international nonstate individuals and organizations. 

Domestically, the United Front has emerged as one of the most aggressive proponents of stripping away foreign influences within religious practices and bringing them under state control — making them more Chinese, a process known as "Sinification."
"Sinification of religion in China is an important discourse of Party General Secretary Xi Jinping on the problem of religion and religious work," Ma Jin, a United Front official, told the Islamic Association of China, a state-backed organization, in January.

"This recent crackdown on the Muslim activities is really a part of a national campaign of China today to correct what they believe are the excesses in permitting Arab-style mosques ... and influence by the Middle East. The Salafi and Wahhabi groups have been pouring money in China," says Dru Gladney, an anthropologist at Pomona College and an expert on Hui Muslims. 

"These restrictions through UFWD are part and parcel of government efforts to control Islamic practices, to make them more Chinese."
In East Turkestan, Uighur-language books and films have been expunged, Uighur intellectuals imprisoned, and Uighur children sent to state-run schools to be taught Mandarin Chinese and culture.
For the Hui across China, mosques have become the major vehicle for Sinification. 

In April 2018, authorities began revoking the state-issued licenses given to imams who have residency outside the province in which they practice and from those who have studied abroad. 

In Ningxia, smaller mosques without licensed imams have been closed outright.
Ningxia sent senior leadership delegations to visit East Turkestan's detention camps last November and signed a counterterrorism cooperation agreement with East Turkestan a month later.

Like many mosques, the Huarenjie mosque in downtown Zhengzhou, Henan, is now monitored around the clock through a network of surveillance cameras installed last year by the local public security bureau.

Imams in Henan and Ningxia must now attend monthly training sessions that can last for days. 

There, imams told NPR, they are taught Communist ideology and state ethnic policy and discuss Xi Jinping's speeches. 

Imams must then pass an exam testing their ideological knowledge in order to renew their license each year, mirroring how the government issues licenses to imams in the East Turkestan colony.
"We go along with it. We say what we have to say, because it is just words, and it lets us continue to work in the mosque," said one of the few imams still based in Henan, requesting his name be kept anonymous because of fears of political reprisal.

Fears of Saudi influence
Mosque employees say orders to demolish mosque domes and minarets are transmitted orally from local officials citing the United Front, with no written notice. 

The demolitions are swiftly executed at night, to avoid protests and video documentation.
"We ourselves do not even have the documents. [The United Front] takes them back at the end of each meeting," a local Henan official says in a recording NPR listened to of a meeting between local officials and employees at a mosque whose domes were removed after the meeting.
"Party organs like the UFWD work outside the state legal system and thus have far greater power than the state bureaucracy and are not required to report back to the State Council," the equivalent of China's cabinet, says Leibold.
Others say officials are looking to avoid the attention that mass mosque demolitions and detentions of Muslims in East Turkestan have attracted.
"Local officials learned from East Turkestan. They know that by aggressively restricting people in obvious ways, like constructing detention centers and leaving written evidence, they might create resistance," Tianfang, the pen name of a prominent blogger critical of China's religious policies, told NPR.
The crackdown on China's Hui Muslims is in part driven by the government's fears that fundamentalist strains of Islam like Salafism and Wahhabism are filtering into China by way of Hui students who study in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and through private religious foundations on the Arabian Peninsula that have funded some Hui social enterprises and mosques.
Signs of Saudi influence, including Arabic script, are being removed across China. 

Hui women in Henan and Ningxia provinces say they are no longer allowed to wear the head-to-toe black abaya customary to Saudi women, and Hui shops say they no longer stock Saudi-style clothes for men or women.
Imams suspected of preaching Salafism are also promptly removed. 

One of them, Han Daoliang, was the imam at Huarenjie Mosque in Zhengzhou, Henan province's capital, according to mosque attendees. 

Han raised his hands three times during prayer instead of just once, they said, marking him to Zhengzhou officials as a Salafi adherent.

Hui tombstones inscribed in Arabic outside Xiaomagou Mosque in Zhengzhou, Henan.

Forced by local officials to resign this year, Han is now living in Malaysia, according to acquaintances. 

His former mosque has been given a state-appointed imam. 

According to a new plaque and mosque employees, the house of worship is now run by a new committee appointed by the state, with a board including two non-Muslim government officials.

"Sweep away the black and root out evil"
The crackdown on Hui Muslims is backed by a national anti-corruption effort launched by the government in 2018 to "sweep away the black and root out evil." 

Posters exhorting residents to "sweep away the black" are now ubiquitous in Chinese cities and such slogans have been scrawled in graffiti on village walls.
Among the crimes the campaign targets is using "religious connections at villages and townships to form mobs," according to implementation guidelines published late last year. 

State media reports say 6,885 "black and evil" criminal organizations were taken down under the campaign as of January.
The "sweep away the black" campaign has also decimated power bases outside the Communist Party structure, including among religious communities. 

Hui communities are now told that unauthorized religious events or proselytizing are considered gatherings of "black" forces or "underworld forces."
Those unauthorized gatherings include Islamic schools run by Hui mosques, nearly all of which have been closed across China, particularly in Henan and Ningxia, according to residents in Henan, Ningxia, Yunnan and Gansu provinces. 

NPR visited multiple former Islamic schools in September, several of which looked as if they had been cleared in a hurry — with dusty bedding piled on dormitory beds and chipped dishes and other kitchenware stacked haphazardly in corners.
All taught Arabic language and some Islamic doctrine, but some are run more like vocational schools or social welfare schools for students who might be otherwise ineligible or unable to afford an education.

Discarded kitchenware lies on the floor of Magou Mosque's Islamic School in Zhengzhou, Henan province. It was forced to close suddenly last April.

"We barely taught any Islamic doctrine. It was about making sure these children were educated and would not become criminals or radicalized," said a former teacher surnamed Ma, who did not want her full name used for fear of political reprisal.
She had taught at an Islamic school in China's southwestern Yunnan province, which closed last April. 

The school had stayed open despite orders in 2014 to expel all non-local students, particularly those having residency status in East Turkestan.
Ma was interrogated by police about the school's curriculum and whether the school was distributing drugs. 

A common stereotype about ethnic minorities in China is that they sell drugs. 

One of her colleagues was held incommunicado for three days and subjected to "thought work," or ideological training, Ma says.

Rewards for reporting suspicious behavior
In Ningxia's Tongxin county, a rare female-only Islamic school once renowned across China's northwest is being readied for demolition after it was shut down last April to make way for residential development.
"It is the government's policies. Who knows if they will change and when?" one of the school employees told NPR in hushed tones. 

She withheld her name because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Hui residents of Tongxin say local officials are now offering rewards between $700 and $2,820 to those who report suspicious religious behavior, such as proselytizing Islam or secretly teaching Islamic texts. 

Some male mosque attendees have begun wearing cloth masks covering the lower half of their faces when attending daily prayers to avoid identification.
Hui who have performed the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, fall under particular suspicion. Last year, a group of about 20 pilgrims was detained in Saudi Arabia for having the wrong visas before being sent back to China, according to two people with friends in the group. 

Two Hui pilgrims with residency in East Turkestan were promptly sent to low-security East Turkestan detention facilities, according to the two people with friends in the group.

Unbearable pressure
NPR found evidence of significant pushback from Hui seeking to delay or avoid implementing religious restrictions. 

Hui say they drag out orders to demolish mosque domes, and some students continue to secretly attend religious classes, despite shuttered schools.
In Henan, NPR came across one mosque in the process of "renovating" its dome by building a cover to shield it from view, a compromise between local officials who demanded its removal and nearby Hui residents who refused to do so. 

Mosque employees were also installing translucent plastic Arabic calligraphic inscriptions on the mosque walls – nearly invisible to all but true believers – to satisfy demands that they remove all Islamic symbols and Arabic script.

Hui Muslim men leave the Laohuasi mosque after Friday prayers in Linxia, Gansu province, in March 2018. Gansu so far has been able to keep most of its mosques intact while domes and minarets of mosques in other provinces have been altered or removed.

"The Hui people have been through one storm after another, and this is a storm that will pass," the mosque's imam told NPR. 

"Who knows how the political environment may change? We do not want to spend money to tear our dome down, only to have to pay to build it up again next year."
Fearing the worst, some younger Hui Muslims are looking to leave China and have emigrated to Malaysia and Dubai in the past few years.
"The pressure on not just one's religious behavior, but how one lives one's daily life, is unbearable," said a young Hui man from Ningxia surnamed Tian, who did not want to use his full name for fear of being punished for talking to a foreign journalist. 

"It weighs on your chest."
Ma Ju, a leader in a Sufi sect of Hui Muslims, left China for the United Arab Emirates in 2009 because of his outspoken criticism of religious restrictions in East Turkestan. 

This year, he fled to the United States, because the UAE has an extradition agreement with China.
"The oppression I saw inflicted on Tibetans 20 years ago and the Uighurs 10 years ago, has finally reached my people," he says.
Ma Ju worries for his community back in China, especially now that technological tools like facial recognition make evading restrictions in China nearly impossible.
"You have legs, but you can't run away," he says. 

"You have money, but it's of no use. You have a heart, but you cannot lift yourself up. This is a new kind of repression."

'If you enter a camp, you never come out': inside China's war on Islam

In Hotan, documents show officials are expanding detention camps and increasing surveillance

by Lily Kuo in Luopu

The Luopu County No 1 Vocational Skills Training Centre is hard to miss. 

It emerges suddenly, a huge campus towering over hectares of farmland.
Outside the compound, surrounded by tall white concrete walls lined with barbed wire and surveillance cameras, a police car patrols while several guards carrying long batons stand watch. 

The centre, which straddles a highway, is bigger than most of the surrounding villages – about 170,000sq metres. 

A banner on one building says: “Safeguard ethnic unity.”
Half a dozen people stand on the roadside, staring at the buildings. 

No one is willing to say exactly what this prison-like facility is or why they are waiting on its perimeter.

Images of East Turkestan, China, taken in December as part of a Guardian investigation into the mass detention of Uighur Muslims in China. 

“We don’t know,” says an older woman. 

Another woman has come to see her brother but declines to say more. 

A young girl with her two brothers announces they have come to see their father. 

Her mother quickly hushes her.
They are reluctant to talk because the building is not a formal prison or university, but an internment camp where Muslim minorities, mainly Uighurs, are sent against their will and without trial for months or even years.
Researchers and residents say East Turkestan, where the Luopu County No 1 Vocational Skills Training Centre is located, has borne the brunt of the government’s crackdown on Muslims because of its density of Uighurs and distance from major cities.
“We have a saying in Hotan: If you go into a concentration camp in Luopu, you never come out,” said Adil Awut*, from Hotan City, who is now living overseas.
In December, the United Nations asked for direct access to the camps after a panel said it had received “credible reports” that 1.1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs, Hui and other ethnic minorities had been detained.

Beijing has aggressively defended its policies and sought to portray the camps as benign and East Turkestan, where outbursts of violence occurred in the 1990s and 2000s, as peaceful thanks to government efforts.

Uighur leaders say China's actions are precursors to genocide

A starkly different reality emerges in Luopu, also known as Lop county, where Guardian interviews with current and former residents and analysis of public documents reveal new details about the government’s continuing campaign in one of the worst-affected areas of East Turkestan.
Local authorities are expanding detention camps, increasing surveillance and policing, and co-opting residents through intimidation, force and financial incentives.

The cost of ‘stability control’
In the past year, at least 10 buildings have been added to the No 1 Vocational Skills Training Centre, according to satellite imagery. 

Construction work on the camp, identified through company records found by the University of British Columbia student Shawn Zhang, was still being carried out when the Guardian visited in mid-December.
Luopu, a sparsely populated rural county of about 280,000 that is almost entirely Uighur, is home to eight internment camps officially labelled “vocational training centres”, according to public budget documents seen by the Guardian.

Police patrol the Old Town in Kashgar, to the west of Luopu county. 

In 2018, officials expected to accommodate 12,000 “students” as well as another 2,100 inmates at another detention centre – a total of about 7% of the county’s adult population, or 11% of the entire male population.
Luopu county also planned to spend almost 300m yuan ($44m) on “stability control”, including almost $300,000 on a surveillance system to cover all mosques, and funding for almost 6,000 police officers to work in “convenient police stations” and security checkpoints, as well as to patrol residential areas.
The security measures and staggering costs underline China’s commitment to its controversial policies in East Turkestan despite growing criticism.
Across the province, domestic security expenses doubled in 2017 as the security campaign got under way, with spending on detention centres in counties with large concentrations of ethnic minorities quadrupling, according to Adrian Zenz, a researcher focused on China’s ethnic policies.
Budget overruns were common. 

Luopu county exceeded its budget by almost 300% in 2017, the highest increase in spending in all of Hotan prefecture.
Yet, the buildup continues. 

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute analysed 28 camps across East Turkestan and found they had expanded 465% in size since 2016, with the largest growth between July and September last year. Five camps in Hotan city and surrounding counties had at least doubled in size, with one camp increasing 2,469% between 2016 and 2018.
In Luopu, officials are bringing more than 2,700 assistant officers into the county’s 224 villages and townships. 

The “students” are closely monitored: almost 2,000 staff and police have been hired to oversee 12,000 detainees.
Authorities are also spending money on incentivising residents. 

Officials in Luopu hire local imams and other religious leaders as “patriotic religious people”, paid a yearly stipend of 4,200 yuan (about $600) in an area where average disposable income is 6,800 yuan a year. 

Their job is in part to stop residents from going on non-government organised pilgrimages to Mecca.
The relatively low-level assistant police, recruited mostly from Uighur communities, are paid 4,100 yuan a month, almost on a par with police in major cities.
Some local governments are struggling to maintain this pace of spending. 

In neighbouring Cele county, where authorities expected to have almost 12,000 detainees in "vocational" camps and detention centres, a budget for 2018 says: “There are still many projects not included in the budget due to a lack of funds. The financial situation in 2018 is very severe.”
As China’s economy slows, they may struggle even more. 

Zenz said: “The sustainability of this system basically depends on the financial capabilities of the central government … The long-term financial sustainability of all these top-down measures is certainly questionable.”

‘Don’t come here’
Today, Hotan prefecture is under “grid style” management, involving intense policing and mass surveillance. 

On the Luopu government website, it is described as “often in a state of level one or two response”, the highest state of emergency.
In Luopu, like many places in East Turkestan, the movements of Uighur residents are restricted. While Han Chinese are waved through security checkpoints, Uighur commuters register their ID cards, do full body scans, have their vehicles searched and their faces scanned.

CCTV monitoring on a street corner in Luopu county.

Hand-held devices scan smartphones for content deemed problematic. 

A police officer demanded to check the phone of a Guardian reporter because, she said “someone saw Arabic or Uighur language on it”.
Abdulla Erkin*, born and raised in Luopu county, was living in Urumqi, in the north of East Turkestan, when the crackdown began in earnest. 

He says his family warned him not to return. “They all told me: ‘Don’t come here. Don’t come here. Just live in Urumqi.’” 

His sister, who works in a local government bureau in Luopu told him: “It’s worse day after day.”
Erkin says most of his friends have been sent to a camp or prison. 

Now living overseas, he discovered last month that two of his brothers had been detained, and he fears five of his nephews have also gone. 

A Uighur businessman living in north-eastern China told the Guardian he left Hotan because of the constant threat of being detained.
“My sense as well is that the counties of Hotan prefecture have been the target of most severe repression,” said Darren Byler, a lecturer at the University of Washington who has been focusing on East Turkestan. 

“From the perspective of the state, Hotan is framed as the most ‘backward and resistant’.”
Chinese officials have said international observers are “welcome to East Turkestan”, but Guardian reporters were questioned by police in Luopu for four hours and followed by at least seven people in Hotan City.
An official at the police station adjoining the No 1 Vocational Training Centre told the Guardian “all reporters, foreign or Chinese, from outside East Turkestan” were subject to their security measures.

‘Red star’ households
In a village in Luopu county, almost every home has a plaque on the door marking it a “model red star family”. 

These are families who have met requirements, including demonstrating “anti-extremism thought” and a “sense of modern civilisation”.
Over the past year, Luopu local officials have gathered villagers to sing patriotic songs, a practice common in the camps, or to teach female residents how to be “good new era women” who promote “ideological emancipation”.
But it’s not clear that these initiatives are what have inspired obedience.
A woman burning a pile of branches lists people in her family who have been sent “to training”, including her 16-year-old son. 

Another woman says her husband has been in training in a different village since December 2017. She doesn’t know why he was sent. 

“We have always been farmers,” she says.
A man carrying plastic bags of naan and skewers explains that his neighbour has gone to the training centre. 

He suddenly interrupts himself: “We are scared talking with you.” 

He says: “They will retaliate.”

* Name has been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee