Chinese Islamophobia

Arabic, Muslim symbols ordered taken down in China's capital
www.aljazeera.com
The Arabic script on the signboard of a halal restaurant is seen covered in Beijing 
Authorities in the Chinese capital ordered halal restaurants and food stalls to remove Arabic script and symbols associated with Islam from their signs, part of an expanding national effort to "Sinicize" its Muslim population.
Employees at 11 restaurants and shops in Beijing selling halal products said officials told them to remove images associated with Islam, such as the crescent moon and the word "halal" written in Arabic, from their signs.
Government workers from various offices told one manager of a Beijing noodle shop to cover up the "halal" in Arabic on his shop's sign and then watched him do it.
"They said this is foreign culture and you should use more Chinese culture," said the manager, who, like all restaurant owners and employees, declined to give his name because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The campaign against Arabic script and Islamic images marks a new phase of a drive that has gained momentum since 2016.
The campaign has included the removal of Middle Eastern-style domes on many mosques around the country in favour of Chinese-style pagodas.

Ethnic violence
China, home to 20 million Muslims, officially guarantees freedom of religion, but the government has campaigned to bring the faithful in line with Communist Party ideology.
It is not just Muslims who have come under scrutiny. 

Authorities have shut down many underground Christian churches, and torn down crosses of some deemed illegal by the government.
But Muslims have come in for particular attention since a riot in 2009 between mostly Muslim Uighur people and majority Han Chinese in the far western colony of East Turkestan, home to the Uighur minority.
Spasms of ethnic violence followed, and some Uighurs, chafing at government controls, carried out knife and crude bomb attacks in public areas and against the police and other authorities.
In response, China launched what it described as a crackdown on "terrorism" in East Turkestan.
Now, it is facing intense criticism from Western nations and rights groups over its policies, in particular, mass detentions and surveillance of Uighurs and other Muslims there.
The government says its actions in East Turkestan are necessary to stamp out religious "extremism". Officials have warned about creeping Islamisation, and have extended tighter controls over other Muslim minorities.
Analysts say the ruling Communist Party is concerned that foreign influences can make religious groups difficult to control.
"Arabic is seen as a foreign language and knowledge of it is now seen as something outside of the control of the state," said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies East Turkestan.
"It is also seen as connected to international forms of piety, or in the eyes of state authorities, religious extremism. They want Islam in China to operate primarily through Chinese language," he said.
Kelly Hammond, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas who studies Muslims of the Hui minority in China, said the measures were part of a "drive to create a new normal".
Beijing is home to at least 1,000 halal shops and restaurants, according to the Meituan Dianping food delivery app, spread across the city's historic Muslim quarter as well as in other neighbourhoods.
It was not clear if every such restaurant in Beijing has been told to cover Arabic script and Muslim symbols. 

One manager at a restaurant still displaying Arabic writing said he had been ordered to remove it but was waiting for his new signs.
Several bigger shops visited by Reuters replaced their signs with the Chinese term for halal - "qing zhen" - while others merely covered up the Arabic and Islamic imagery with tape or stickers.
The Beijing government's Committee on Ethnicity and Religious affairs declined to comment, saying the order regarding halal restaurants was a national directive.
While most shopkeepers interviewed by Reuters said they did not mind replacing their signs, some said it confused their customers and an employee at a halal butcher shop accused authorities of "erasing" Muslim culture.
"They are always talking about national unity, they're always talking about China being international. Is this national unity?"

Criminal Confession

China Locks Up Ethnic Minorities in Camps. It Says So Itself.
By Rian Thum

An image from undated video footage of Muslims reading from official Chinese language textbooks at a training center in Hotan, in East Turkestan. The Chinese authorities recently acknowledged the existence of a vast network of indoctrination camps.

NOTTINGHAM, England — “Citizens, please remain calm and relax, no one in the re-education camps will starve, be left in the cold, be punished or be forced to work.” 

With these words, an official from China’s Communist Youth League tried to reassure relatives and friends of members of predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who had been taken to internment centers. 

The detainees were “infected by an ideological illness,” the official said, and the camps would “cleanse the virus from their brain.”
When the speech was delivered in October 2017, the camps were unknown even to some of the people they targeted, the roughly 11 million ethnic Uighurs and one million Kazakhs of East Turkestan, a colony in northwestern China. 

A year later, the network of indoctrination centers is widely known even outside China: first revealed by inmates’ families and then confirmed, perhaps unwittingly, by the government’s public call for bids on procurement contracts to build camp infrastructure — and now by an official justification of sorts.
A couple of weeks ago, the East Turkestan People’s Congress passed legislation that for the first time provides an explicit basis for the “transformation” of people influenced by “extremism” in “education institutions” through “ideological education, psychological counseling, behavioral correction, Chinese language training” and other programs. 

Last week, the chairman of East Turkestan’s government described the camps as air-conditioned boarding schools that offer cultural programs for people suspected of minor offenses to help them realize that “life can be so colorful.”
Yet former participants have described a system of forced detention and abuse, with military-style discipline, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
In the past, local officials and local media would sometimes boast online of successfully implementing this camp system. 

But more senior officials — presumably partly out of concern with global opinion — have tended to profess ignorance, including as late as August, in response to questions by a United Nations panel on racial discrimination.
So why is China suddenly acknowledging a network of concentration centers whose existence it had so adamantly denied?
Some news reports say that the law “legalizes” the camp system. 

But that characterization is misleading: Authorizing the construction and administration of so-called training centers does not in itself sanction the extrajudicial internment of people in them, which, as scholars have argued, is illegal even under Chinese law.
The recent legislation does, however, recognize and officialize the detention system — and that’s significant.
In China, the law sometimes seems to play catch-up with enterprising officials. 

For example, “abnormal” beards were legally banned in March 2017, years after the East Turkestan authorities had begun arresting or otherwise penalizing men with large beards. 

Likewise, the latest legislation is evidence that the entire camp program has evolved from local, extralegal improvisation to a formal system that is to be woven into the fabric of the Chinese state.
The concentration camps no longer are an ad hoc measure; they are meant to be permanent. 

And their reach is spreading geographically.
Uighurs throughout China have been called back to East Turkestan by their hometown police and then detained. 

Thousands of Uighurs also appear to have been sent out of East Turkestan to prisons elsewhere in China.
The central government in Beijing provides part of the funding for this enormous internment and indoctrination system. 

And only the highest levels of the ruling Politburo could have decided in 2016 to reassign Tibet’s party chief Chen Quanguo to East Turkestan — to which he brought the repressive measures he had used against Tibetans and Buddhist pilgrims.
The intensifying repression against Uighurs and other minorities in East Turkestan reflects a nationwide shift in the government’s approach to ethnic difference. 

Chinazism

Whereas the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) once professed to value diversity, it now increasingly seeks to assimilate minorities: In recent years, it has even encouraged Uighurs to marry members of the ethnic Han majority by offering cash to mixed couples. 

And as the anthropologist Darren Byler has documented, the authorities are enlisting Han civilians in their efforts, sending them out as “big brothers” and “big sisters” to check in on and watch Uighur and Kazakh homes.
The foremost theorist of this Sinicization project, known as “ethnic mingling,” is Hu Lianhe, an official at the Central Political and Legal Affairs Committee. 

He was the Chinese representative who denied the existence of re-education camps in East Turkestan to the United Nations panel this summer. 

Hu is also known for developing a “theory of stability” that links ethnic identity with extremism, and as the political scientist James Leibold recently pointed out, Hu’s growing visibility likely is no coincidence. 

It may portend a far more comprehensive effort by the government in Beijing to control and subjugate non-Han minorities throughout the country within what official propaganda calls the “Chinese race.”
As the C.C.P. has steadily moved away from recognizably communist policies over the last three decades, its leaders have increasingly justified their rule through Han-centered nationalism and by casting the party as the ultimate guarantor of China’s stability and prosperity, notions encapsulated under the slogan “Chinese Dream.” 

Uighur aspirations for basic cultural rights and more autonomy threaten those claims, and the handful of Uighur attacks over the past decade or so call into question the C.C.P.’s ability to protect the country’s ethnic-Han majority.
Han-centric racism and Islamophobia are driving China’s leaders to blame unrest on Uighur culture and religion. 

But behind their efforts to forcibly re-engineer minority cultures also lies a pressing need to boost their legitimacy and account for their hold on power. 

The East Turkestan problem, in their view, isn’t a local issue; it’s a threat to the foundations of the entire system they oversee today.

Chinese Islamophobia

China Declared Islam a Contagious Disease – and Quarantined One Million Muslims
By Eric Levitz

Chinese occupation forces patrol as Muslims leave the Id Kah Mosque after the morning prayer in China’s East Turkestan colony. 

China is among the most ethnically homogeneous large countries in the world, with Han Chinese accounting for 91 percent of its population. 

The ruling Communist Party considers China’s homogeneity and social cohesion to be pillars of its strength (and, also, potent rationalizations for discrimination against ethnic minorities and authoritarian rule).
But the colony of East Turkestan, in northwest China, is home to a large population of Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim, Turkic ethnic group. 

The Chinese government has long worried that the Uighurs will attempt to establish an independent homeland in the region. 

In 2009, ethnic riots in East Turkestan claimed hundreds of lives; since then, individual Uighur nationalists have carried out multiple violent attacks.
So, to combat the impression that Uighurs have any cause for wanting their own separate state — let alone for deploying violence to achieve it — Xi Jinping’s government has decided to declare Islam a contagious “ideological illness,” and quarantine 1 million Uighurs in reeducation camps, according to an estimate from the United Nations. 

In interviews, former inmates from these camps say that they were made to renounce their faith, sing Communist Party songs, consume pork, and drink alcohol; and the truly “ideologically sick” have been tortured and killed.
At first, Beijing was content to reserve its concentration camps for suspected radicals. 

But, as the Atlantic’s Sigal Samuel explains, they eventually decided that the Uighurs’ ideological malady was so destructive and contagious, it was best to quarantine them prophylactically, upon the slightest apparent symptom (like, say, the appearance of a long beard on an Uighur male’s face).
To the West, China insists that its reeducation camps are mere vocational schools. 

But, as Samuel notes, Beijing offers a more forthright account of its intentions to its Chinese constituents. 

Here’s how the Communist Party explained its policy in an official recording:
Members of the public who have been chosen for reeducation have been infected by an ideological illness. 

They have been infected with religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology, and therefore they must seek treatment from a hospital as an inpatient.
… There is always a risk that the illness will manifest itself at any moment, which would cause serious harm to the public. 

That is why they must be admitted to a reeducation hospital in time to treat and cleanse the virus from their brain and restore their normal mind … 

Being infected by religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology and not seeking treatment is like being infected by a disease that has not been treated in time, or like taking toxic drugs … 

There is no guarantee that it will not trigger and affect you in the future.
Having gone through reeducation and recovered from the ideological disease doesn’t mean that one is permanently cured … 

So, after completing the reeducation process in the hospital and returning home … they must remain vigilant, empower themselves with the correct knowledge, strengthen their ideological studies, and actively attend various public activities to bolster their immune system.
Clearly, this is the missive a political party with a supremely healthy ideology.
To this point, international outcry over China’s mass repression of its Muslim population has been relatively tame. 

As Business Insider notes, the governments of many Muslim-majority countries have declined to express public opposition, for fear of jeopardizing their access to Chinese capital — especially the infrastructure loans that Beijing has provided as part of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative.
Fortunately, the United States remains, for now, the world’s preeminent military and economic power. And as president Trump made clear in his speech withdrawing the U.S. from the Iran nuclear agreement, our country is deeply committed to spreading religious freedom, individual liberty, and other human rights throughout the globe. 

So, is there any reason to doubt that Trump will make the liberation of the Uighurs America’s top priority in its next round of negotiations with China over trade policy?