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.'"