Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

How China Uses Hikvision and Huawei to Subdue Minorities

By Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur

Xi Jinping looming large on a screen in Kashgar, in the East Turkestan colony. As many as one million members of Muslim ethnic minorities are held in concentration camps in East Turkestan.

KASHGAR, East Turkestan — A God’s-eye view of Kashgar, an ancient city in western China, flashed onto a wall-size screen, with colorful icons marking police stations, checkpoints and the locations of recent security incidents. 

At the click of a mouse, a technician explained, the police can pull up live video from any surveillance camera or take a closer look at anyone passing through one of the thousands of checkpoints in the city.
To demonstrate, she showed how the system could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. 

The system sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education, family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an internet cafe.
The simulation, presented at an industry fair in China, offered a rare look at a system that now peers into nearly every corner of East Turkestan, the troubled colony where Kashgar is located.
This is the vision of high-tech surveillance — precise, all-seeing, infallible — that China’s leaders are investing billions of dollars in every year, making East Turkestan an incubator for increasingly intrusive policing systems that will spread across the country and beyond.
It is also a vision that some of President Trump’s aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese companies in the intensifying trade war. 

Beyond market barriers, theft and national security, China is using technology to strengthen authoritarianism at home and abroad — and that the United States must stop it.

How China Turned a City Into a Prison. Children are interrogated. Neighbors become informants. Mosques are monitored. Cameras are everywhere.

Developed and sold by the China Electronics Technology Corporation (C.E.T.C.), a state-run defense manufacturer, the system in Kashgar is on the cutting edge of what has become a flourishing new market for technology that the government can use to monitor and subdue millions of Uighurs and members of other Muslim ethnic groups in East Turkestan.

Treating a city like a battlefield, the platform was designed to “apply the ideas of military cyber systems to civilian public security,” Wang Pengda, a C.E.T.C. engineer, said in an official blog post. “Looking back, it truly was an idea ahead of its time.”
The system taps into networks of neighborhood informants; tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior; tries to anticipate potential crime, protest or violence; and then recommends which security forces to deploy, the company said.
On the screen during the demonstration was a slogan: “If someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections, there will be information.”

Pictures from presentations by the China Electronics Technology Corporation at recent industry shows.

A New York Times investigation drawing on government and company records as well as interviews with industry insiders found that China is in effect hard-wiring East Turkestan for segregated surveillance, using an army of security personnel to compel ethnic minorities to submit to monitoring and data collection while generally ignoring the majority Han Chinese, who make up 36 percent of East Turkestan’s population.
It is a virtual cage that complements the concentration camps in East Turkestan where the authorities have detained a million or more Uighurs and other Muslims in a push to transform them into secular citizens who will never challenge the ruling Communist Party. 

The program helps identify people to be sent to the camps or investigated, and keeps tabs on them when they are released.
President Trump administration is considering whether to blacklist one of the Chinese companies at the center of the East Turkestan effort, Hikvision, and bar it from buying American technology. Hikvision is a major manufacturer of video surveillance equipment, with customers around the world and across East Turkestan, where its cameras have been installed at mosques and concentration camps. 

C.E.T.C. owns about 42 percent of Hikvision through subsidiaries.
“East Turkestan is maybe a kind of more extreme, more intrusive example of China’s mass surveillance systems,” said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied the technology in the region. 

“These systems are designed for a very explicit purpose — to target Muslims.”

Shoppers lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last fall.

Virtual fences
In the city of Kashgar, with a population of 720,000 — about 85 percent of them Uighur — the C.E.T.C. platform draws on databases with 68 billion records, including those on people’s movements and activities, according to the demonstration viewed by a Times reporter at the industry fair, held in the eastern city of Wuzhen in late 2017.
By comparison, the F.B.I.’s national instant criminal background check system contained about 19 million records at the end of 2018.
The police in East Turkestan use a mobile app, made by C.E.T.C. for smartphones running the Android operating system, to enter information into the databases.
Human Rights Watch, which obtained and analyzed the app, said it helped the authorities spot behavior that they consider suspicious, including extended travel abroad or the use of an “unusual” amount of electricity.
The app, which the Times examined, also allows police officers to flag people they believe have stopped using a smartphone, have begun avoiding the use of the front door in coming and going from home, or have refueled someone else’s car.
The police use the app at checkpoints that serve as virtual “fences” across East Turkestan. 

If someone is tagged as a potential threat, the system can be set to trigger an alarm every time he or she tries to leave the neighborhood or enters a public place, Human Rights Watch said.
“The government’s arbitrary power is reflected, or coded, in the app,” Ms. Wang said, adding that the system “is programmed to consider vague, broad categories of behaviors, many of them perfectly legal, as indicators of suspiciousness.”
Intelligence agencies in many countries use sets of behavior to single out individuals for greater scrutiny. 

But China has taken that approach to an extreme, treating the Muslim population in East Turkestan as suspect from the start and defining suspicious behavior in sweeping terms, including peaceful religious activities such as making a donation to a mosque.
The Chinese government has defended the surveillance program, saying it has improved security in the region, and says the indoctrination camps in East Turkestan are job training centers. 

Hikvision has denied “any inappropriate actions in East Turkestan,” and C.E.T.C. declined to comment when reached by phone.
C.E.T.C. traces its roots to the military research labs that helped build China’s first nuclear bomb, satellite and guided missile. 

Established as a state defense manufacturer in 2002, it soon expanded into civilian security matters, working with Microsoft, for instance, to create a version of Windows that meets the government’s internal security requirements.
In recent years, it turned to East Turkestan.
The Communist Party, which took control of the region in 1949, has long been wary of the Uighurs, whose Turkic culture and Muslim faith have inspired demands for self-rule, and sometimes attacks on Chinese targets. 

State investment in surveillance took off a decade ago after anti-Chinese rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, killed nearly 200 people.
The real bonanza of security contracts came after Xi Jinping took the helm of the party in late 2012. Spending on internal security in East Turkestan totaled nearly $8.4 billion in 2017, six times as much as in 2012, including funds for surveillance, personnel and the concentration camps.
Hikvision has received contracts in East Turkestan worth at least $290 million for its cameras and facial recognition systems. 

Another company tapping into East Turkestan’s security gold rush is Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that the United States has described as a security threat. 

It signed an agreement last year with the region’s police department to help officers analyze data.

A checkpoint in Hotan last year.

The multilayered program to harvest information from Uighurs and other Muslims begins on the edges of towns and cities across East Turkestan in buildings that look like toll plazas.
Instead of coins, they collect personal information.
On a recent visit to one checkpoint in Kashgar, a line of passengers and drivers, nearly all Uighur, got out of their vehicles, trudged through automated gates made by C.E.T.C. and swiped their identity cards.
“Head up,” the machines chimed as they photographed the motorists and armed guards looked on.
There are smaller checkpoints at banks, parks, schools, gas stations and mosques, all recording information from identity cards in the mass surveillance database.
Identification cards are also needed to buy knives, gasoline, phones, computers and even sugar. 

The purchases are entered into a police database used to flag suspicious behavior or individuals, according to a 2017 dissertation by a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences that features screenshots of the system in Kashgar.
Not everyone has to endure the inconvenience. 

At many checkpoints, privileged groups — Han Chinese, Uighur officials with passes, and foreign visitors — are waved through “green channels.” 

In this way, the authorities have created separate yet overlapping worlds on the same streets — and in the online police databases — one for Muslim minorities, the other for Han Chinese.

“The goal here is instilling fear — fear that their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life,” said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author who has written about East Turkestan as well as China’s surveillance state. 

“The amount of people and equipment used for security is part of the deterrent effect.”
A database stored online by SenseNets, a Chinese surveillance company, and examined by the Times suggests the scale of surveillance in East Turkestan: It contained facial recognition records and ID scans for about 2.5 million people, mostly in Urumqi, a city with a population of about 3.5 million.
“This can be pulled off by anyone, and that’s the part that worries me,” said Victor Gevers, a Dutch security researcher and co-founder of GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes internet security.
According to Mr. Gevers, who discovered the unsecured database, the online records indicate that a network of about 10,000 checkpoints in Urumqi made more than six million identifications in 24 hours.
The authorities in East Turkestan also force residents to install an app known as “Clean Net Guard” on their phones to monitor for content that the government deems suspicious.
Kashgar and other areas of East Turkestan have in recent years systematically collected DNA and other biological data from residents too, especially Muslims. 

Officials now collect blood, fingerprints, voice recordings, head portraits from multiple angles, and scans of irises, which can provide a unique identifier like fingerprints.
These databases are not yet completely integrated, and despite the futuristic gloss of the East Turkestan surveillance state, the authorities rely on hundreds of thousands of police officers, officials and neighborhood monitors to gather and enter data.
“We risk understating the extent to which this high-tech police state continues to require a lot of manpower,” said Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who has studied security spending in East Turkestan. 

“It is the combination of manpower and technology that makes the 21st-century police state so powerful.”

Security gates at the entrance to a Kashgar mosque in 2016.

Expanding beyond the colony
East Turkestan’s security and surveillance systems are already attracting admirers from the rest of China. 

Delegations of police officers from other provinces and cities have visited Kashgar and other cities to admire — and consider adopting — the measures.
They often visit police command centers where rows of officers peer at computers, scanning surveillance video feeds and information on residents on the C.E.T.C. platform.
“The digitalization of police work has achieved leap-like growth in East Turkestan,” Zhang Ping, a counterterrorism officer from Jiujiang, a city in southeastern China, said during a visit to East Turkestan last year, according to an official report on the website of the city’s police bureau.
East Turkestan’s high-tech policing, he added, was “something we should vigorously study.”
Zhejiang and Guangdong, two wealthy provinces on China’s southeastern coast, have been testing the C.E.T.C. surveillance system used in East Turkestan, “laying a robust foundation for a nationwide rollout,” the company said last year.
C.E.T.C. has also signed an agreement with the police in the southern city of Shenzhen to provide an advanced “command center information system” similar to the one in East Turkestan.
The technology has some way to go. 

Dust and bad lighting can hobble facial recognition on security cameras, which struggle to track large numbers of people simultaneously. 

Even the best systems can be accurate in less than 20 percent of cases, according to one study published by a journal linked to the Ministry of Public Security.
A technician who until recently installed and maintained computers for the authorities in East Turkestan said police surveillance centers relied on hundreds of workers to monitor cameras, an expensive and inefficient undertaking.
And outside urban centers, police officers often do not have the skills to operate the sophisticated systems, said the technician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions for speaking to a journalist.
The spending spree on security in East Turkestan has left local governments across the region with staggering bills, raising questions about how the authorities can keep the systems running.
In Kashgar, for example, the county of Yengisar warned this year of a “huge shortfall” from spending on security and said that it had accumulated 1 billion renminbi, or about $150 million, in previously undeclared “invisible debt.”
“The pressure from ensuring basic spending for additional staff and to maintain stability is extraordinary,” it said.
Still, the region’s leaders told officials this year that they must not wind back spending.
“Preserving stability is a hard-and-fast task that takes priority over everything else,” the leadership said in the region’s annual budget report. 

“Use every possible means to find funds so that the high-pressure offensive does not let up.”

China's Muslims fear crackdown in ancient city of Xi'an

Tourist flock to the Xi’an’s ancient Muslim area – but reports from elsewhere in China of crackdowns and concentration camps are setting nerves on edge
by Xiaomei Chen in Xi'an

A political poster promotes ‘socialist values’ between lists of religious regulations at Xiaopiyuan Street Mosque in Xi’an’s Muslim quarter. 

The streets of Xi’an’s Muslim quarter are bustling. 

Tourists from all over China and the rest of the world throng the small stalls and restaurants for delicacies such as yangrou paomo lamb stew, roujiamo lamb burgers, persimmon cakes and “smoked ice-cream” – a bowl of puffed cereal dipped in liquid nitrogen.
There has been a Muslim community in the capital of Shaanxi Province – at the eastern end of the old Silk Road in central China – since the seventh century. 

During the Tang dynasty, when the city was called Chang’an, travelling Muslim merchants and some soldiers from central and west Asia made it their home. 

Many married Chinese Han women, and their offspring became known as Hui, now one of China’s 56 ethnic groups.

The Muslim quarter is well-known for its range of halal and non-halal food stalls

In 2019, as the population of the wider city nears the 10 million mark that would define it as a “megacity”, the Muslim population is estimated at around 65,000. 

Most live and work in the Muslim quarter, in the centre of historical Xi’an.
Life is good here. 

Restaurants and stalls boast of being featured on China Central Television, the state broadcaster, in programmes such as A Bite of China.

Many visitors come for the halal food, the most well-known example of which is yangrou paomo. Diners tear mo bread into pieces and then watch the chef churn it into the lamb soup. 

Roujiamo is another famous halal dish – a burger made from juicy shredded braised lamb and crispy baked bread.
Then there are the wide, thick and incredibly filling biangbiang noodles – perfect for cold winter days. 

In the summer, liang pi is popular (cold rice noodles served in a sauce of chilli oil, pepper powder, vinegar and diced garlic, garnished with bean sprouts and sliced cucumber), as is pomegranate juice – sweet, sour and cool.

The entrance to Xiyangshi Street in the Muslim quarter

But non-Muslim snacks such as Hunan stinky tofu, Hubei roasted potatoes and barbecued squid and octopus are increasingly available too. 

More and more shops now sell typical souvenirs from Shaanxi – such as leather shadow-play puppets and replicas of Qin terracotta warriors and horses.
There are also plenty of the kind of generic Chinese gifts that can be bought in any Chinese tourist town, most of them made in the manufacturing hub of Yiwu: Che Guevara T-shirts, cigarette containers featuring Mao Zedong, Buddhist prayer beads, you name it. 

Caricature street artists do a roaring trade as well.

Shops and stalls sell everything from spices and stinky tofu to souvenirs for tourists

Behind the story of booming business lurks an old fear – the precarious situation of being Muslim in China, especially given the reports of anti-"terror" crackdowns and political re-education camps in the majority-Muslim region of East Turkestan, more than 1,000 miles to the north-west.

“You can’t be too careful,” says one Chinese Muslim Hui I meet through a former colleague, and who does not want to be named in the international media. 

“You know the situation in East Turkestan? We don’t want that in Xi’an!”

A souvenir shop.

During Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, religious practices and rituals were banned, and mosques were repurposed as factories, administration offices or community centres. 

The 14th-century Great Mosque in Xi’an was temporarily turned into a factory to produce steel, and the 300-year-old Bei Guangji Street Mosque became the city’s cultural centre and sports hall.
Many here credit the economic liberalisation under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s with the Muslim quarter’s resurgence. 

Many Hui people I talk to speak of cleaner streets, renovated houses and better business opportunities.

Top left and main: Xiaopiyuan Street Mosque; top right: inside Daxuexi Alley Mosque

Recently, though, change is making people nervous. 

The old bilingual signs in Arabic and Chinese at the entrances to the Muslim quarter have been replaced with new ones that only feature Chinese characters. 

A senior committee member at one of the city’s largest mosques – who also asked not to be named – says local party officials asked him to introduce a ceremony to raise the Chinese national flag. 

He refused, but agreed to display a flag at the mosque and put up several political posters. 

He was also asked to discontinue the Muslim summer school. 

The police warned him against “East Turkestan terrorists”, he says.
The mosque official is alarmed by news that authorities in Weizhou attempted to demolish its Grand Mosque last summer, but has faith that China’s constitution will “guarantee freedom of religion”. 

“I don’t think the order came from central government,” he says. 

“It was some local official’s creative execution of our religious policies.”

A courtyard inside Xiaopiyuan Street Mosque

Leaving the mosque, I see the sign at the entrance to the Muslim quarter – right behind the Parkson shopping mall with its Adidas sportswear, L’Oréal shop and Chow Tai Fook jewellery. 

The Arabic characters have indeed disappeared. 

At the gate of another mosque I spot two red Chinese national flags. 

Inside, the ancient grey brick walls now display glossy political posters. 

“Like Cultural Revolution,” grunts one Hui man as he leaves the prayer hall.
Back on Xiyangshi food street, Aisha Ma is selling mahua, a kind of fried dough twist. 

She warns me against negative rumours about Muslims. 

“You shouldn’t believe them,” she says. 

“Here in China, we Hui people are peaceful. Look around, life has never been better.”
A few months ago, the old bilingual signs in Arabic and Chinese at the entrances to the Muslim quarter were replaced with new ones that only feature Chinese characters

She pauses. 

“Country comes first, then family,” she adds – a communist propaganda slogan that has been used in songs and patriotic speeches for decades.
A young Hui man selling barbecued squid on the stall next to hers echoes her words: “Country comes first, then family.”
They repeat the slogan in unison twice more, as if to reassure themselves.

China vs. Islam

Poet fears for his people as China 'Sinicizes' religion

By SAM MCNEILL

In this Sept. 28, 2018, photo, Muslim Chinese poet Cui Haoxin dons an Islamic hat in his home in the city of Jinan in the eastern province of Shandong, China. Cui is an outspoken critic of the government's policies towards Muslims at home and abroad, writing poetry and tweeting about alleged abuses against Islamic traditions. 

JINAN, China – Cui Haoxin is too young to remember the days of his people's oppression under Mao Zedong.
The 39-year-old poet was born after the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when the Hui — China's second-largest Muslim ethnic group — were among the masses tormented by the Red Guard.
In the years since, the Hui (pronounced HWAY) generally have been supportive of the government and mostly spared the kind of persecution endured by China's largest Muslim group, the Uighur.
There are signs, though, that that is changing.

Cui fears both that history may be repeating itself and for his own safety as he tries to hold the ruling Communist Party accountable.
In August, town officials in the Hui region of Ningxia issued a demolition order for the landmark Grand Mosque in Weizhou, though they later backed off in the face of protests.
More recently, authorities in nearby Gansu province ordered closed a school that taught Arabic, the language of the Quran and other Islamic religious texts. 

The school had employed and served mainly Hui since 1984. 

And a Communist Party official from Ningxia visited East Turkestan, center of Uighur oppression, to "study and investigate how East Turkestan fights 'terrorism' and legally manages religious affairs."
China under Xi Jinping is clamping down hard on minorities, tightening control over a wide spectrum of religious and political activity. 

In many places, a campaign to "Sinicize" religion has prompted authorities to seize Bibles, remove the "halal" designation from food products, demolish churches and strip mosques of loudspeakers and Islamic crescents and domes.
Cui has spoken out against government intrusions. 

He is working on a novel with a nightmarish plot: believers are brutalized by demons in a Cultural Revolution in Hell. 

"The Muslims resisted and tried to protect the mosque," he said, describing the work. 

"They failed."
He worries that violence lies ahead.
"One has dignity. For a person, it is his or her bottom-line." he said. 

"If the persecution is too unbearable, if something happens, as I said, there could be a disaster."
___
Cui speaks eloquently about his people, who claim descent from Persian and Arab traders who came to China 1,300 years ago.
The 10 million Hui living across China generally speak Mandarin — Cui is a former teacher of the standard Chinese dialect — and follow many Chinese cultural practices. 

They enjoy relative freedom of worship compared to the Uighurs, some of whom call the Hui "tawuz," which means watermelon in the Uighur's Turkic language.
"Green or Islamic on the outside, and red or Communist on the inside," writes University of Toronto professor Isabelle Cote in a study on Uighur attacks on Hui in East Turkestan from 2009 to 2013. Farther back, Hui served Chinese emperors as shock troops repressing Uighur rebellions.
In Beijing, Arabic signs mark Hui bakeries, teahouses, halal restaurants and a thousand-year old mosque bustling with activity in the historically Islamic neighborhood of Niujie.
Ma Changli, who has run a butcher shop in the enclave for the past five years, said police help provide security for Friday prayers at the mosque.
"Our country has always been pretty supportive to our worship," the 39-year-old butcher said, standing in front of an Islamic inscription and hanging lamb and beef racks.
While the Hui face prejudice from the Han Chinese majority, they are proud to be Chinese and have a "positive outlook for the future," said David Stroup, a University of Oklahoma professor who met Hui across China in 2016.
Many saw an opportunity in China's Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion trade and infrastructure initiative that runs across several Muslim-majority nations in central Asia and Africa, he said. 

They aspired to become middlemen on a revived Silk Road linking China with Islamic nations.
"It was going to be an opportunity for the Hui to play an important role as ambassadors to the Islamic world," Stroup said.
It came as a shock, he said, when new regulations targeted the practices of Hui alongside those of other religious groups earlier this year. 

Stroup said the shift has dampened optimism in a community that saw language and religion as links to trading partners in the Muslim world.
___
Tension bubbled up in August in Weizhou, a dusty Muslim-majority town in China's northwestern "Quran Belt."
The town's pride and joy is a gleaming white mosque with four minarets and nine domes tipped with crescent moons that dwarfs a surrounding warren of brick and concrete homes.
Officials issued a demolition order for the Grand Mosque, alleging it had been "illegally expanded" and adding that 1.07 million yuan ($154,765) from foreign sources had been received by four local mosques — financing that would be illegal under Chinese law.
Hundreds of Hui flocked to the mosque's courtyard for a rarity in China: a political protest. 

City authorities detained AP journalists and prevented them from conducting interviews at the mosque.
The protesters' success was even rarer. 

The mosque remained unscathed, if draped in a banner reading in Chinese: "Stick to directives of Sinicized religion."
Weeks later, a top Communist propaganda official in Ningxia blamed the incident on "an oversimplified administrative decision" by local authorities.
"It originally should not have happened," Bai Shangcheng, director-general of the regional Communist Party department that oversees religious groups, said at a news conference in Beijing.
Dissent simmered quietly in the Hui community after the mosque incident, according to Cui, who circumvented China's internet censorship to tweet about the protest and feed video to a Turkish television station.
In late November, the Communist Party-run Global Times reported that Ningxia had signed an anti-'terrorism' cooperation agreement with East Turkestan during a visit by Ningxia Communist Party head Zhang Yunsheng.
China has set up a vast security apparatus in East Turkestan with pervasive police checkpoints and surveillance cameras. 

By some estimates, more than 1 million Uighurs and Kazakhs have been detained in internment camps in a crackdown on 'extremism'. 

Two former camp detainees have told the AP that some Hui have been swept up in the clampdown too.
The order to close the Arabic language school came early this month, the Global Times reported. 

An unnamed expert in Beijing told the newspaper that teaching Arabic arouses public concern if it crosses over into preaching religious content.
The article quoted China's education law: "The State separates education from religion."
___
Cui is one of the few Chinese citizens disturbed enough — and brave enough — to criticize the Communist Party openly. 

For that, he has experienced censorship, detention, and "home visits" by police.
He spoke to The Associated Press at his home in Jinan, a city in eastern China where his family traces its roots back five centuries. 

Skyscrapers dwarf old mosques and boisterous halal restaurants with gold domes, Arabic script and crescents.
He doesn't drink alcohol or eat pork, but neither does he pray five times a day.
His bedside table is stacked with poetry and novels, not religious books.
Hanging in the living room is a framed red embroidery by his mother of the Islamic profession of faith in yellow Arabic stitching.
It was underneath this tapestry that police entered his home earlier this year to demand he stop criticizing the government online.
Cui posts attacks on Beijing's policies related to Muslims in China and abroad, such as the government's support of Myanmar despite widespread criticism of its treatment of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority.
A few months later, on Nov. 27, police brought him to the local Public Security Bureau for a few hours of questioning.
A recent Human Rights Watch report said that China started in November "targeting Twitter users in China as part of a nationwide crackdown on social media."
Cui refused to stop or delete his tweets.
Sixty years ago, Communist Party cadres descended on the historically Hui city of Linxia to excise "superstitions" in the city in a "struggle against the privileges of feudalism and religion," according to a 2016 book by Matthew Erie, an Oxford University professor of modern China studies.
Red Guards lit bonfires with wood from demolished mosques and tombs, Erie writes in "China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law."
They forced Muslims to wear signs reading "enemies of the state."
Cui fears the current crackdown on religion will return China to those days of blood.
At a teahouse in Jinan, as steam from his jasmine tea mixes with the scent from a tray of sweets, he recites from his poem "Letter from Prison:"

"It seems like I can see the bulldozer running wild in the Thousand and One Nights.

The angel upon my shoulder urges me: 'Tell the truth under the grey sky.'"

Jailing Muslims, burning Bibles, and forcing monks to wave the national flag: How Xi Jinping is attacking religion in China

• China has been increasingly cracking down on Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists.
• Authorities are subjecting Muslims to an unprecedented amount of surveillance, shutting down Christian churches, and forcing monks to pledge allegiance to the state.
• The officially atheist Chinese Communist Party disapproves of all kinds of grassroots organizations as they are seen to undermine its grip on power.

By Alexandra Ma
Chinese authorities have subjected the majority-Muslim Uighur ethnic group, which is based in East Turkestan, to an unprecedented amount of surveillance. Here a mural in Yarkland, East Turkestan, in 2012 says: "Stability is a blessing, Instability is a calamity."

China is waging an unprecedented war on religions.
Over the past year alone, China has detained Muslims because of their faith, forced Buddhists to pledge allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party, and coerced Christian churches to take down their crosses or shut down.

The sinicization of religion
The Party, which is officially atheist, has for decades attempted to control religious organizations to maintain its dominance.
Its State Administration for Religious Affairs, set up in 1951, allows five religious organizations to exist under the state's control: a Party-sanctioned form of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism.
The state controls these groups' personnel, publications, and finances. 

Technically, citizens are free to practise religion freely, as long as their sect is officially sanctioned by the government.
Party officials in 2015 introduced the term "sinicization" into official government lexicon, in which they called on Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian leaders to fuse their religions with Chinese socialist thought.
Roderic Wye, a former first secretary in the British Embassy in Beijing, told Business Insider: "The party has always had trouble with religion one way or another, because often religious activity tends to imply some sort of organization. Once there are organizations, the party is very keen to control them."
But under the dictatorship of Xi Jinping, the government's crackdown appears to have increased at an alarming scale.

Read more: Planting spies, paying people to post on social media, and pretending the news doesn't exist: This is how China tries to distract people from human rights abuses

Many Muslims in East Turkestan said they were arrested for showing distinct markers of Islam. Here, Uighur men pray before a meal in Turpan, East Turkestan, in September 2016.

'They want to cut off Islam at the roots'
In the western region of East Turkestan, the home of the majority-Muslim Uighur ethnic minority, authorities have installed a massive police state and imprisoned up to 1 million Uighurs.
Detainees were arrested for showing distinct markers of Islam, like wearing a veil or growing a long beard.
The majority-Muslim Hui people, who are scattered around China, also fear that the government will extend its crackdown to them.
In the northern city of Yinchuan, home to the largest concentration of Hui Muslims in the country, authorities have banned the daily call to prayer because it apparently created noise pollution, the South China Morning Post reported.
One unnamed imam in Linxia, central China, also told Agence France-Presse in July: "They want to secularize Muslims, to cut off Islam at the roots. These days, children are not allowed to believe in religion: Only in communism and the party."

Read more: China is locking up its Muslim minorities, and pushing Islamophobia to get Europe to do it too
China has also been cracking down on "underground" Catholic churches, such as this one in Jiexi, photographed in March 2018.

Monitored services, censored sermons
The crackdown extends beyond Islam.
Authorities have also targeted Christians outside the state-sanctioned Catholic and Protestant associations by burning Bibles, shutting down churches, and ordering people to renounce their faith, the Associated Press reported.
Churches allowed to remain open have to install facial-recognition cameras in the building, or risk getting shut down. 

Party officials censor and add state propaganda to pastors' sermons, Bob Fu, who runs the US rights group ChinaAid, told France24.
In September, authorities in China and the Vatican signed an agreement in which Francis officially recognized seven Beijing-appointed bishops, who had been excommunicated because they weren't approved by the Holy See. 

The deal ceded power from the Holy See to the Communist Party.
The loyalties of China's approximately 10 million Catholics are split between the Vatican and the state-supervised Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. 

China has about 100 million Protestants, the Financial Times reported.

Read more: China is burning bibles and making Christians renounce their faith to ensure total loyalty to the Communist Party
Two monks wait before the customary flag-lowering ceremony at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in May 2012.

Monks raising the flag
Buddhism and Taoism — which has historically deeper roots in East Asia — is not exempt either.
China restricts religious operations in Tibet, and spiritual leader the Dalai Lama remains in exile. Activists say the state monitors the daily activities of Tibetan monasteries, limits believers' travel and communications, and has routinely detained monks on terrorism charges— not dissimilar from the situation in East Turkestan.
Earlier this year, China's famous Shaolin Temple — an ancient Buddhist monastery believed to be the birth place of kung fu — raised the Chinese national flag for the first time in its 1,500-year history as part of a government campaign to demonstrate its patriotism.

Read more: China's Communist party violently cracks down on a new group — student communists
Monks at the Shaolin Temple raise the Chinese national flag to mark National Day in October 2018. The ceremony marked the second time, since August that the Chinese flag was raised in the temple's 1,500-year history.

'No other source of moral or social authority is tolerated'
The Communist Party, keen to maintain its sole grip on power, disapproves of all kinds of grassroots organizations as they are seen to undermine it and disrupt internal stability.
Wye, the former British Embassy official, said China's keenness to exert control over religions is also to limit foreign influence.
"There's always been a concern the Chinese state has had about the extent of foreign influence over religion and the way foreign forces might use to manipulate societal thought," Wye, now an associate fellow at Chatham House, told Business Insider.
"This is part of the wider 'China dream' that Xi Jinping has, to make China big and strong again," he added.
"Whatever political and social development China will take in the future, it is to be decided and promulgated by the Chinese Communist Party, and no other source of moral or social authority is tolerated."

China's crimes against humanity

China Must End Its Campaign of Religious Persecution

By SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY Concentration Camps Construction is Booming in East Turkestan

The United States was founded on the premise that all individuals are created equal, with certain unalienable rights. 

Throughout our history, Americans have fought and died for these rights. 

They are ingrained in the fabric of our society and regularly debated, whether in coffee shops on Main Street or the halls of Congress.
Those fundamental rights and freedoms are part of our national identity, but that’s not the case in other parts of the world. 

That’s why for more than a century, the United States has been a vocal supporter, not just rhetorically but financially, as well, of global humanitarian efforts.
Over the past two decades, religious persecution in China has become a larger and more pressing issue. 

The Department of State’s annual International Religious Freedom report has included the People’s Republic of China as a particularly concerning offender since 1999.
Disturbing reports have surfaced out of China of late detailing the imprisonment of Christian pastors, Bible burning, and demolishing of Christian churches. 

The Chinese government has rounded up more than one million Uighur and Kazakh Muslims into concentration camps. 

The state has long suppressed the freedom of Tibetan Buddhists, as well as those who practice Falun Gong.
The Chinese government has removed crosses from 1,200 to 1,700 Christian churches as of a 2016 New York Times report, and has instructed police officers to stop citizens from entering their places of worship. 

There have been violent confrontations between government authorities and worshipers, and communist leaders have implemented restrictions prohibiting children 18 years old and younger from participating in religiously-focused education.
A piece published in Forbes earlier this year describes how Chinese authorities have bulldozed homes belonging to Uighur Muslims, collected passports to restrict travel and collected Uighur DNA and fingerprints in order to track its own citizens.
Communist leaders in China try to explain away these abuses by reiterating their commitment to preserving the Chinese culture, a practice known as sinicization. 

Approximately 100 million people in China belong to religious groups that are outside what the Chinese government deems acceptable. 

That’s approximately 100 million people who are subject to persecution by communist leaders in China, and even those that practice an officially sanctioned religion have not been spared harassment. That persecution stems from religious differences and has spread to other areas of daily life, including the restriction of social media.
The United States doesn’t have the singular authority to stop the religious persecution occurring in China, but it can apply significant pressure to Chinese leaders by linking the need for religious freedom to the economic and political aspects of our bilateral relationship that are important to China. As China’s largest trading partner, the United States is in a powerful position to influence Chinese leaders and stand up for human rights. 

Fighting for religious liberty should be a central part of the United States’ relationship with China. Senator David Perdue and I, with a bipartisan group of senators, recently introduced a resolution condemning violence against religious minorities in China and reaffirming America’s commitment to promote religious freedom and tolerance around the world. 

It also calls on China to uphold its Constitution and urges the President and his administration to take actions to promote religious freedom through the International Religious Freedom Act of 1988, the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act, and the Global Magnitsky Act.
No matter where they live, everyone should be able to freely express their religious beliefs. 

The United States has been a beacon of freedom since before its founding. 

We must continue that tradition by doing what we can to promote human rights and freedoms both here and around the globe.