A Chinese Hero: Brenton Tarrant

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

Xi Jinping's most famous fan

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

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

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

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

China’s Muslims Brace for Attacks

First, it was the Uighurs. Now, other Muslim minorities are being threatened—and the worst may be yet to come.
BY JAMES PALMER
A Chinese Hui Muslim girl wears a fancy headdress as she is held by her mother after Eid al-Fitr prayers marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at the historic Niujie Mosque on June 16, 2018 in Beijing, China. 

At a recent event at the Asia Society in New York discussing the million or more people, mostly Uighur Muslims, being held in internment camps in China’s western region of East Turkestan by the Chinese authorities, a young man of Chinese descent approached me with a disturbing question. 

“I’m a Hui person,” he said, referring to China’s largest Muslim minority group. 

“And among the community in China, they are very afraid that they will be next, after the Uighur. There are already ‘anti-halal’ groups attacking us and breaking the windows of our restaurants. What do you think will happen?”
The news for the Hui, and other Chinese Muslims, isn’t good. 

In mid-December, several provinces removed their halal food standards, a move heralded by government officials as fighting a fictional pan-halal trend under which Muslim influence was supposedly spreading into secular life. 

That’s a severe contrast with previous government policies, which actively encouraged the development of the halal trade for export. 

This week, meanwhile, three prominent mosques were shut, sparking protests. 

Many mosques across the country have already been closed, or forced to remodel to a supposedly more Chinese style, and the Communist Party presence there has been strengthened, with pictures of Xi Jinping placed in prominent locations and the walls covered in Marxist slogans.
There are more than 20 million Muslims in China, and 10 of the country’s 55 officially recognized minorities are traditionally Muslim, with the largest by far being the Hui and the Uighur. 

Islam’s history in China is more than a millennium old, and there have been previous clashes—as with other faiths—between imperial authorities and believers, most notably the Dungan rebellions of the 19th century. 

Muslim minority cuisine is common, cheap, and popular throughout the country; these restaurants usually feature Arabic writing and images of famous mosques on the walls. 

As Islamophobia has grown in the last four years, however, restaurants are increasingly removing any public display of their faith.
Islam isn’t the only religion being targeted. 

Beijing demands state control and oversight of all faiths. 

This supervision used to be run through the State Administration of Religious Affairs (SARA), but that department was dissolved last March, with responsibility for religion taken over directly by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), which handles the Communist Party’s control of civil society domestically. 

The dissolution of SARA also meant the end of many working relationships between the department and religious groups. 

Most of the former staff have left, and while Wang Zuo'an—the long-standing head of SARA known for a relatively light hand—is now one of 10 vice ministers at the UFWD, he has almost no staff, no power, and no role.
“SARA had become a very important buffer between the legitimate practices, needs, and works of the faiths and the demands of the party. Now it’s been turned into an instrument of overt and explicit control. They were once there to make religion work well. Now they are there to make religion work for the party,” commented one Westerner with long experience working with religious NGOs in China, who asked for anonymity. 

Local officials, meanwhile, under pressure in an increasingly paranoid internal party environment, have been forced to abandon policies of local tolerance in favor of heavy-handed enforcement.

On the ground, that has translated into a much colder environment for believers. 

Christians across the country have faced a wave of repression, with arrests of prominent ministers, the closure of churches, a ban on Bible sales online, and the removal of crosses. 

Tibetan Buddhism, always closely monitored, is being more tightly watched than ever. 

Even so-called Chinese religions, such as Taoism and non-Tibetan Buddhism, are having a tough time, being denied permission for new buildings or classes and going through layers of added bureaucracy.
But the turn against Islam is by far the most prominent—and potentially the nastiest—example of China’s clampdown on religion.
In large part, it flows from the adoption of a totalitarian regime in East Turkestan, where any Islamic practice is now read by the security state as a sign of potential extremism. 

Other Muslim communities were previously able to endure the storm in part because their Uighur members were forced back to East Turkestan; even advocates of Saudi-style Salafism were able to operate in Ningxia and elsewhere.
Today, though, the intensity of the anti-Islamic campaign in East Turkestan has resulted in other provinces adopting the same ideas, lest their leaders be accused of being soft on terrorism or of having ideological sympathy for Islam. 

That’s particularly the case for party officials who are from Islamic families; numerous Uighur officials have been arrested for being “two-faced”—presenting themselves as loyal party members while being secretly sympathetic to religion. 

“They used to ask the Hui officials to help handle Hui affairs sensitively,” a Han Chinese state employee who works in Islamic areas told Foreign Policy. 

“But now if you’re Hui, you have to be doubly hard on your own people.”
The state campaign has been backed by a growing popular Islamophobia, which has erupted in the last four years. 

Anti-Uighur racism has always existed, but it previously focused largely on ethnicity, not belief. 

The new hate largely began with the attack at a train station in the southern city of Kunming in 2014, when eight Uighur attackers killed 31 travelers. 

An aggressive Han chauvinism became the norm online—aided by it being one of the few remaining forms of tolerated public political speech. 

Many Chinese friends and colleagues bristled at any mention of Islam, seeing Westerners as anti-Chinese and biased in favor of Islam. 

While other online speech has been harshly shut down, the censors have barely touched abuse of Muslims, even calls for violence.
Chinese Islamophobes have created a mythical halalification movement, which functions in their imagination something like sharia does in the minds of rural American lawmakers fearful that the mullahs might start marching down Main Street. 

Food has often been a clashing point; young Uighurs often avoid eating in nonhalal restaurants not for religious reasons but as a gesture of cultural defiance, and the forced consumption of pork has now become routine in East Turkestan. 

In the minds of Chinese Islamaphobes, however, Muslims are the ones imposing themselves on good, ordinary Chinese. 

The mere offering of halal services is taken as a sign of imminent threat; when one delivery app included it as an option, Muslims faced a wave of online hate.
Several fears are bundled together here. 

Chinese are very worried about food safety, and the description of halal food as qingzhen—which just means “Islamic” but literally translates as “pure and clean”—created a belief that halal consumers were somehow privileged or claiming that the Han were dirty. 

That’s linked to a deep-seated belief among Han Chinese that ethnic minorities are enjoying special treatment, based on government policies that gave them bonus points on university entrance exams or allowed more lenient family planning. (The daily discrimination faced by visibly non-Han Chinese citizens was largely invisible to Han.) 

Fake news about Muslim atrocities has spread via social media into Chinese society.

In its attempts to control Uighurs abroad, the Chinese government is holding families hostage.

Hundreds of thousands of Uighur have been detained without trial in China's western colony of East Turkestan.

There could be another reason for Islamophobia in China. 

A newly powerful Han nationalism needs an internal enemy, and Islam fits the bill. 

Originally, the People’s Republic of China, like the Soviet Union from which it drew its model, envisaged itself as a multiethnic state. 

As with Russians in the Soviet state, though, Han Chinese massively dominated—but at least in official statements, Han chauvinism was condemned from the very top.
Today, however, Han nationalism is openly on the rise, both among ordinary Chinese and in state policy. 

Minority language education, once guaranteed, has been vastly restrained; even for minorities largely viewed in a positive light, such as Koreans, the number of schools offering their own tongues has shrunk from dozens to a handful. 

State rhetoric increasingly pushes a purely ethnonationalist line.
A new identity often depends on a convincing foe. 

The party might prefer it if young Han men and women defined the enemy as Americanness, but that’s impossible in a country that loves The Big Bang Theory and defines success as getting a child into Harvard University. 

Islam, however, makes for the perfect enemy. 

It’s perceived as foreign, but it’s present across China. 

It’s ideologically unacceptable to the state. 

It’s stained by an association with "terrorism". 

And for the vast majority of Han, it has no cultural or political appeal.
For China’s Muslim citizens, vast numbers of whom see themselves as loyal Chinese, the turn against their faith and history is already a tragedy. 

But with Islamophobia fueled by both the terror of East Turkestan and the anger of ordinary Chinese, there may be worse to come.

China’s Gulag for Muslims

In modern-day “re-education” prisons, Beijing is forcing ethnic Uighurs to forsake their religion. Why don’t Muslim governments rise up in anger?
By Mustafa Akyol

An Acehnese Muslim woman cries as she takes part in a protest rally in support of ethnic Uyghur Muslims in China, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 21 December 2018.

One of the darkest episodes of the 20th century was the gulag — the Soviet system of forced labor camps where dissidents were imprisoned in terrible conditions, often to perish. 

The camps were established by Lenin, expanded by Stalin and finally exposed to the world by the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his 1973 masterpiece, “The Gulag Archipelago.”
“Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of Archipelago,” he wrote, and “it is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold, and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides.”
Today, Russia’s gulags are long gone, as is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that operated them. 

But now another dictatorship, ruled by another Communist Party, is operating a new chain of prisons that evoke memory of the gulags — more modern, more high-tech, but no less enslaving.
These are China’s “re-education camps,” established in the far-western East Turkestan colony, where up to a million Uighurs are imprisoned in order to be indoctrinated. 

People are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays. 

Survivors also tell about military-style discipline, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
The target of this mass persecution is China’s Muslim minorities — especially the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people based in East Turkestan. 

They follow a mainstream, moderate interpretation of Sunni Islam. 

But that is enough of a “mental illness” for Chinese Communists, whose ideology considers all religions, including Christianity, to be backward superstitions that must be diluted and nationalized. 

That is why they go as far as forbidding people from having beards or fasting during Ramadan, and forcing them to consume pork and alcohol, both of which are forbidden in Islam.
Chinese authorities say they are alarmed about extremists among the Uighurs — and, in fact, a handful of extremists have carried out attacks against government targets over the years. 

But those extremists arose in response to a decades-old policy of subjugation, along with ethnic colonialization, that Beijing has pursued against the Uighurs. 

That history suggests that Beijing’s current “counterterrorism” campaign will be only counterproductive — deepening a vicious cycle that authoritarian minds are often unable to understand, let alone break.
And here is the strangest aspect of this story: China’s “re-education” policy is a major attack on Muslim people and their faith, Islam, yet the Muslim world has remained largely silent. 

While the policy has been condemned by human rights groups and the liberal news media in the West, along with Uighur organizations themselves, only a few Muslim leaders, like the Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim and Pakistan’s minister of religion, Noorul Haq Qadri, have raised some public concerns. 

Not until last month did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation finally express concern about “the disturbing reports on the treatment of Muslims” by China.
That is all very meek given how grim the situation is — and how it compares to what we would have seen if the same persecution had been carried out by some other country, such as, say, Israel.
Why is that? 

Why are Muslim leaders, especially those who love to be the champions of oppressed Muslims, so lenient toward China?
There are three answers. 

One is that coziness with China, the world’s second-largest economic power, pays. 

China is the top trading partner of 20 of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. 

Its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a huge path of commercial and transportation infrastructure intended to pass through much of the Middle East, holds a lucrative promise for many Muslim nations.
Moreover, China does not shy away from offering its economic assistance as hush money. 

In July 2018, The Global Times, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, ran an interesting editorial suggesting that China’s government would help Turkey secure its “economic stability” — but only if Turkish officials stopped making “irresponsible remarks on the ethnic policy in East Turkestan,” which means stop criticizing China’s human rights violations. (At about the same time, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was also promising to help the Turkish economy, but only if Turkey corrected its own human rights violations. In other words, Turkey was being pulled in opposite directions, and, sadly, the dark side has proved stronger so far.)
A second reason for Muslim silence is that the Chinese government crackdown on Uighurs is based on a premise that law and order can be restored by eradicating enemies of the government and traitors within a society.

This is authoritarian language that most Muslim leaders understand well. It is their own language.

The third reason is that most Muslims who are likely to feel solidarity with their oppressed coreligionists think of the oppressors as “the West,” defined as the capitalist, hedonist, Zionist civilization led by the Great Satan. 

These Muslims, particularly the Islamists, believe that all of their coreligionists should unite with other anti-Western forces — a stance that evokes Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a “Confucian-Islamic” alliance against the West in his 1993 article in “Foreign Affairs” titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”
For Muslim autocrats and Islamists, a Confucian-Islamic alliance may still be alluring. 

China can look like a great model, in which the economy grows without Western nuisances like human rights, free speech or limited government. 

For Muslim societies, however, the Uighur crisis must be a wake-up call. 

It shows what can happen to Muslims when authoritarian governments embrace Islamophobia as state policy.
Islamophobia exists in the liberal democracies of the West, too — but there it can be criticized by the news media, checked by the courts and constrained by liberal institutions and traditions. 

Muslims can still practice their religion freely, and can even become lawmakers by being elected to bodies like the United States Congress.
For Muslim societies, in other words, a choice between freedom and dictatorship should not be too difficult. 

In freedom, you can live as a Muslim in safety and dignity. 

Under dictatorship, as China shows us, you end up in a re-education camp.

A Summer Vacation in China’s Muslim Gulag

How one university student was almost buried by the “people's war on terror.”
Foreign Policy
An officer speaks into a radio transmitter at a prison in China.

Since announcing a “people’s war on terror” in 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has created an unprecedented network of re-education camps in the East Turkestan region that are essentially ethnic gulags. 

Unlike the surgical “strike hard” campaigns of the recent past, the people’s war uses a carpet-bombing approach to the country’s tumultuous western border region. 

Chen Quanguo, Xinjiang’s party secretary and the architect of this security program, encouraged his forces to “bury the corpses of terrorists in the vast sea of a people’s war.” 

But the attempt to drown a few combatants has pulled thousands of innocent people under in its wake.
Sporadic violence has rattled the region since July 5, 2009, when indigenous Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority, took to the streets of Urumqi, the regional capital, to protest the murder of fellow Uighurs who worked in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan. 

The protests spiraled into a riot, which claimed 197 lives and nearly 2,000 injuries before order was restored. 

Insurrection has since spread beyond the capital, and skirmishes between Uighurs and security personnel have become common occurrences.
Amid the protracted conflict and rising Islamophobia in China, Communist Party officials are responding by creating a surveillance state. 

In the 12 months preceding September 2017 alone, the party-state advertised nearly 100,000 security positions in East Turkestan. 

Every resident of the region has been affixed with the label “safe,” “normal,” or “unsafe,” based on metrics such as age, faith, religious practices, foreign contacts, and experience abroad. 

Those deemed unsafe, whether or not they are guilty of wrongdoing, are regularly detained and imprisoned without due process.
Estimates indicate that as many as 800,000 individuals, mostly Uighurs, have been incarcerated in the re-education camps. 

Based on the current population of Uighurs in East Turkestan, which stands at some 11 million, this amounts to the extrajudicial detention of nearly 10 percent of the ethno-national group.
While Chinese officials maintain that these re-education camps are schools for eradicating extremism, teaching Chinese language, and promoting correct political thought, Radio Free Asia has reported that the detention centers are overpopulated and detainees poorly treated. 

Those reports are confirmed by testimony from a young Uighur man studying in the United States, torn from the American university where he studied, and where I work, to a Chinese gulag. 

He shared his story with me over four meetings in 2017 and 2018. (Due to concerns for Iman’s security — the Chinese government has previously targeted the families of Uighur writers — pseudonyms have been used for all parties.)
Iman, from a middle-class Uighur family, came to study in the United States a few years ago. 

He succeeded in the Chinese education system, even earning a degree from a university in eastern China. 

In 2017, Iman flew back to China for the summer recess, planning to spend time with friends on the east coast before he returned to East Turkestan to see his mother. 

Despite the exhaustion from the long flight, he was filled with joy as he landed in the Chinese metropolis where he’d previously lived for several years, despite the discrimination he would likely face. 

Ethnic minorities in China, especially Uighurs, are often denied hotel rooms.
As he remained strapped in his seat, a flight attendant approached. 

“They are asking for you,” the woman told him. 

“It’s probably just a visa issue.” 

Her words were of little comfort — after all, he possessed a Chinese passport.
Three uniformed Han Chinese border patrol officers waited for the young Uighur student on the jet bridge. 

Taken into custody, he was subject to a cavity search and then had his devices checked. 

“I knew to delete any sensitive files before the flight,” Iman recalled with a smirk. 

Unable to find incrementing files, an officer rattled off a barrage of questions: “What do you do in North America? Where do you study? We found business cards of Chinese professors. You know a lot of important people, don’t you?”
Although unnerved, Iman answered each question with carefully constructed responses. 

Airport interrogations were nothing new to the young man — he was subjected to questioning after landing in China the previous year — but the protocol was different this time. 

The inspection was much more thorough, the officers more meticulous and less friendly. 

“I knew something was wrong when an officer inspected my shoes. They took out the soles, looked inside, turned them upside-down, and violently shook them. This never happened in the past.”

Another officer approached Iman and told him he would be transported to a local jail. 

The young man demanded an explanation or at least a formal charge. 

He was given neither. 

“May I at least call my mother?” Iman asked. 

“I want to let her know I’ve arrived safely.” 

His request was denied. 

“Will you call her for me?” the young man pleaded. 

The officer retorted, “No, we can’t call her. The local police in Xinjiang should provide her with an update.”
Iman was held for nine days in a local jail while the border authorities contacted law enforcement from his hometown in East Turkestan. 

He was the only Uighur in a room of 34. 

On the ninth day of his incarceration, the police squad from East Turkestan arrived. 

They cuffed Iman tightly and transported him to the train station. 

“Are the handcuffs necessary?” Iman asked. 

“Don’t ask questions,” one officer demanded. 

“We are being lenient — you are supposed to be shackled, too.”
The three Han officers from Iman’s hometown escorted the young man to a train bound for East Turkestan. 

First, though, these three officers had their own questions. 

They repeatedly asked if Iman received a notice from his local police station requesting his return before May 20, 2017, in reference to a regionwide order that required Uighurs studying outside China to return to their hometowns. 

Iman had not. 

The four individuals spent the next 50 hours packed in a hard sleeper compartment set aside for the security personnel. 

As they settled on the train, one of the Han officers handed Iman, who observes Islamic dietary laws, a sack of bread. 

“It was more difficult to find halal food in this city than we expected. This is the best we could do. It has to last you until we reach Xinjiang.”
Iman’s hands remained bound for the entire trip. 

He was only permitted to leave the compartment to use the restroom but was accompanied by at least one officer on each occasion. 

While awake, he spent his time reading textbooks he brought from America. 

“I wore my glasses and read for hours. I thought if I looked as if I was studious, the officers wouldn’t consider me a threat.”
The four detrained in Turpan in East Turkestan. 

“Put this on,” one officer barked as he shoved a hood stitched of heavy fabric at Iman. 

The three officers then guided him to a vehicle and departed for Iman’s hometown. 

The poor ventilation under the hood was made more suffocating by the stale air inside the vehicle, hunger, and dehydration. 

Iman began suffering from severe nausea. 

The officers agreed to remove the hood. 

His symptoms slightly alleviated, and Iman began to engage in small talk with the officers. Coincidently, the chief was Iman’s former classmate, and they reminisced about their school days.
The camaraderie was brief; the vehicle was pulling into the local police station. 

It was the police chief’s turn to interrogate Iman, who was eating his first proper meal since he landed in China, a bowl of soyman, a dish made of small, flat noodles mixed with vegetables. 

The meal, however, could not prevent the panic attack that soon overcame Iman. 

During this third round of interrogation, Iman became dizzy and sweated profusely. 

“I felt as if I had just played a grueling soccer game. My discomfort induced uncontrollable laughter and then a sensation that I was going to faint.”
The stress intensified as he was taken to the detention center, or kanshousuo. 

“I was terrified as we approached.” (As we talked, for the first time Iman directed his gaze at the ground, avoiding eye contact.) 

“The compound was surrounded by towering walls. Military guards patrolled the metal gate. 

Inside, there was little light. It was so dark,” he continued.
He was immediately processed. 

An officer took his photograph, measured his height and weight, and told him to strip down to his underwear. 

They also shaved his head. 

Less than two weeks before, Iman was an aspiring graduate at one of the top research universities in the United States. 

Now, he was a prisoner in an extrajudicial detention center.
Still in his underwear, Iman was assigned to a room with 19 other Uighur men. 

Upon entering the quarters, lit by a single light bulb, a guard issued Iman a bright yellow vest. 

An inmate then offered the young man a pair of shorts. 

Iman began scanning the cell. 

The tiled room was equipped with one toilet, a faucet, and one large kang-style platform bed — supa in Uighur — where all of the inmates slept. 

He was provided with simple eating utensils: a thin metal bowl and a spoon.
Daily routines were monotonous and highly scripted, Iman said. 

“We were awoken every morning at 5 a.m. and given 20 minutes to wash. The guards only provided three thermoses of hot water each day for 20 men, though. I had to vie with the others for hot water. 

I didn’t properly bathe for a week. We were then required to tidy the bed. The guards inspected our work: The corners had to be crisp and the two blankets, which covered the entire platform, wrinkle-free. Breakfast was served at 6 a.m. The menu did not change: moma or steamed bread. After breakfast, we marched inside our cell, calling out cadences in Chinese: ‘Train hard, study diligently.’ Huh, I can’t remember the rest of the verse. I bet it’s on Baidu [Chinese search engine]. Anyway, we marched for several hours. We then viewed ‘re-education’ films until lunch.

“The videos featured a state-appointed imam who explained legal religious practices and appropriate interpretations of Islam. Sometimes the videos had skits warning about the consequences of engaging in ‘illegal religious activities,’ which are displayed on large posters outside every religious site in the region. 

In one skit, a young man was apprehended for studying the Quran at an underground school, a practice authorities are trying to eliminate. 

We watched until it was time for lunch, when we were again served moma and ‘vegetable soup,’ minus the vegetables. After lunch, we were allowed to rest in our quarters, but we were only permitted to sit on the platform bed; lying down was forbidden. After this break, we repeated the morning routine — more marching and videos — until we got the same food for dinner. We were permitted to sleep at 8 p.m. Beijing time, but the light was never turned off.” (Xinjiang’s real time zone is two hours behind Beijing, but the government imposes a single clock across the country.)

In his crowded cell, Iman suffered from loneliness and isolation. 

It was often too disheartening to speak to the others, he said, so he kept to himself. 

“Most of my cellmates had already been incarcerated for over two months without being formally charged. I did befriend a man in his 60s who, during my detention, was sentenced to six years in prison. His ‘crime’? He sent a religious teaching [tabligh in Uighur], a simple explanation of the Quran, though one not produced by a state-appointed cleric, to his daughter using his mobile phone. She shared it with a friend. The authorities convicted him of possession and dissemination of extremist religious content.”
The days in the detention center accumulated with no end in sight. 

Three days turned into a week. 

A week into 10 days. 

Ten days into two weeks. 

Yet Iman was never formally charged. 

Although arbitrary and prolonged detentions violate international law, in China law enforcement may detain “major suspects” for as many as 30 days.
On the 17th day of his incarceration, Iman was called over by a guard. 

“Grab your things,” he shouted as he handed Iman the clothes he wore when he arrived. 

“You are being released.” 

A neighborhood watch group, or jumin weiyuan hui, from his hometown arrived at the detention center to escort Iman to his house but not before they delivered him again to the local police chief. The man looked at Iman and warned: “I’m sure you may have had some ideological changes because of your unpleasant experience but remember: Whatever you say or do in North America, your family is still here and so are we.”
Thirty days after landing in China, Iman finally reached home. 

But there, he was now behind electronic bars. 

His resident ID card, which would be scanned at security checkpoints ubiquitous to the region, now contained information about his “criminal” past. 

Trapped inside East Turkestan’s dystopian surveillance apparatus, he wouldn’t be allowed to step foot in any public buildings, board public transportation, or even enter a shopping center.
Yet much to his surprise, Iman was allowed to return to the United States in time for the fall term. Unable to provide a definitive explanation for this abrupt change of fate, Iman offered two possibilities: He did not, after all, commit any crimes and was deemed unthreatening, or a distant relative who worked in law enforcement negotiated his release and ensured his safe return to school.
Although free, Iman now faces the confines of exile. 

He does not know when or if he can return home. 

Calling or emailing his mother, who herself has been in a re-education center since last October for traveling to Turkey, risks her safety: Contact with relatives abroad is punishable by interrogation and detention.
The Chinese Communist Party’s approach is radical but one officials will not abandon anytime soon. At a recent security meeting in Kashgar in East Turkestan, a Han Chinese official told a crowd of Uighurs: “You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one — you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.”

Unfettered online hate speech fuels Islamophobia in China

By Gerry Shih

In this March 18, 2017 photo, Tao Yingsheng, the imam at the Nangang mosque, stands in the mosque in Hefei in central China’s Anhui province. On the dusty plains of the Chinese heartland, the bitter fight over the mosque illustrates how a surge in anti-Muslim sentiment online is spilling over into the real world. If left unchecked, scholars say, such attitudes risk inflaming simmering ethnic tensions that have in past erupted in bloodshed.

HEFEI, China — The flood of angry anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media was the first sign of how fiercely the suburban middle-class homeowners in this central China city opposed a planned mosque in their neighborhood. 

It quickly escalated into something more sinister.
Soon a pig’s head was buried in the ground at the future Nangang mosque, the culmination of a rally in which dozens of residents hoisted banners and circled the planned building site. 

Then the mosque’s imam received a text message carrying a death threat: “In case someone in your family dies, I have a coffin for you — and more than one, if necessary.”
“How did things get stirred up to this point?” the imam, Tao Yingsheng, said in a recent interview. “Who had even heard of the Nangang mosque before?”
On the dusty plains of the Chinese heartland, a bitter fight over a mosque exemplifies how a surge in anti-Muslim sentiment online is spreading into communities across China, exacerbating simmering ethnic and religious tensions that have in the past erupted in bloodshed. 

It’s also posing a dilemma for the ruling Communist Party, which has allowed Islamophobia to fester online for years as part of its campaign to justify security crackdowns in its restive region of Xinjiang.
“It’s let the genie out of the bottle,” said James Leibold, a professor at La Trobe University in Australia who has tracked the growth of anti-Muslim hate speech on China’s internet.
Interviews with residents and an examination of social media show how a few disparate online complaints by local homeowners evolved into a concerted campaign to spread hate. 

Key to it was an unexpected yet influential backer: a Chinese propaganda official, 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) away in Xinjiang, whose inflammatory social media posts helped draw people into the streets on New Year’s Day, resulting in a police crackdown.
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A stone inscription outside its gate shows the original Nangang mosque was established in the 1780s by members of the Hui minority, the descendants of Silk Road traders who settled across China centuries ago. 

In its present form, the mosque has served the area’s 4,500 Hui for decades, its domed silhouette partially hidden by overgrown shrubs in the countryside beyond Hefei’s last paved boulevards.
Over the past 10 years urbanization has come to Hefei, with sprawling development reconfiguring the landscape and its demographic flavor, and Hui leaders had been pushing for years to relocate their mosque to a more convenient urban location.
City planners in November finally selected a site adjacent to the newly built Hangkong New City condominiums, with its $200,000 two-bedroom units, faux-Mediterranean stylings and a Volvo dealership across the street. 

The project’s homeowners overwhelmingly members of China’s ethnic Han majority began complaining on China’s popular microblog, Weibo.
Some complained the mosque would occupy space promised for a park. 

Others warned that safety in the area would be compromised.
Others were more blunt: Han residents were uncomfortable that a center for Hui community life would be less than 100 meters (300 feet) from their building, a homeowner who later identified himself in messages to the AP by his surname, Cheng, wrote in a petition posted in December.
“And the less said about what happens on Eid al-Adha, the better,” Cheng wrote, referring to the Islamic holiday in which animals are slaughtered for a sacrificial feast. 

“It’s absolutely shocking.”
The story soon caught the attention of Cui Zijian, a boyish-looking propaganda official in Xinjiang who writes about the threat of religious extremism on his Weibo account with nearly 30,000 followers.
On Dec. 16, Cui suggested homeowners lobby local officials to block the construction, adding: “If that doesn’t work, then how about pig head, pig blood.”
Cui followed that a few hours later with another post repeating the four Chinese characters for pig blood and pig head over and over, attracting hundreds of reposts. 

While Cui was criticized by some on Weibo, a larger number — including at least one other government propaganda official — took his post as their cue to hurl abuse at the Hui.
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The mosque dispute was just the latest flashpoint for an increasingly active anti-Muslim social media movement in China.
A video of a Hui girl reciting the Quran in Arabic sparked outrage last May over so-called terrorist infiltration of Chinese schools, prompting officials to announce a “strict ban” on religion on campuses. 

Online activists derailed a Hui official’s effort to regulate the halal food industry, arguing that religion was creeping into the officially atheistic Chinese state.
Han Chinese, who make up 95 percent of the population, have long grumbled about the dozens of China’s officially recognized minority groups receiving advantages on the hyper-competitive college entrance exams or exemptions from family-size limits, but online abuse has increasingly targeted Muslims.
The rise in Islamophobia comes as Chinese have been buffeted by news of militant attacks in Europe, while at home, violence in Xinjiang and elsewhere has been blamed on Muslim separatists. 

Beijing has responded to the bloody, years-long insurgency from Muslim Uighur minorities in Xinjiang with further restrictions on Islamic expression, a move rights groups warn could potentially radicalize moderate Muslims. 

Such policies have also drawn vows of retaliation from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
Ethnic hostility can only deepen, scholars say, when the government stops discussion of the plight of Muslims or ethnic policies while allowing anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech to go unchecked. 

In 2014, Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, who had founded a website to host debates about ethnic tensions in Xinjiang, was sentenced to life in prison on separatism charges.
Government censors go after descriptions of abuses against Muslims, but “it doesn’t take long whatsoever to find incredibly Islamophobic things that seem to be not censored at all,” said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International, which has appealed for Tohti’s release.
Political observers say the recent rise of a faction within the Communist Party advocating for a hard-line approach on religious affairs has coincided with the rise of government-linked commentators who openly warn about the danger of Islam.
“Interest groups have actively promoted Islamophobia in interior regions in order to create a nationwide environment that justifies Xinjiang’s anti-terrorism campaign,” said Ma Haiyun, a history professor specializing in China’s Muslims at Frostburg State University in Maryland. 

“There’s an Islamophobic movement that aims at creating chaos and even conflicts at the local level.”
After briefly moderating his remarks about the Nangang mosque, the propaganda official, Cui, renewed his criticism in February with an essay arguing that his professional and patriotic duty was to resist extremism. 

His online speech about Muslims was part of the job, he said.
“For that, we’re labeled Muslim-smearers,” wrote Cui, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

“But it is those who instigate a fear of Islam, precisely the terrorists and the extremists, who are the ones smearing Muslims.”
Reached in March, an official at the propaganda department where he worked refused to comment on Cui’s involvement in the controversy. 

But Cui now appears to be even better positioned to influence discourse: The official said Cui was transferred in February to work in the cyberspace administration, the agency in charge of censoring online speech.
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Tao, the 50-year old imam, recalled the day in December when he heard his mosque was suddenly the subject of thousands of posts and hundreds of comments on Weibo, a service he barely used. 

He soon found himself soothing local Hui who approached him, shaken by what they were seeing online.
“They said people were planning to hang a pig’s head outside our mosque. I said, ‘Then we’ll remove it.’ They said people will bury a pig’s head in the ground. I said ‘Why can’t we just dig it up?’” Tao said.
After protesters followed through with the threat at the New Year’s Day demonstration, police detained two protest leaders for two weeks and summoned others for questioning, according to residents. 

Since then Han indignation has gave way to quiet seething.
“People have been scared into silence,” said Cheng, the Han tea seller.
During a recent visit to Hangkong New City, homeowners repeated the government’s mantra that ethnic unity was important, but complained that officials sacrificed their interests to appease a minority.
“If 99 percent of our compound is Han, it doesn’t seem appropriate that they put a mosque next door,” said a middle-aged woman who said her surname was Han.
Ma Jianhua, a Nangang district planning official, told the AP that construction will proceed after his office “appropriately handled” homeowners’ petitions, but declined to elaborate.
The mosque dispute has left the city’s Hui community on the defensive, with many eager to emphasize their desire to peacefully coexist with their Han neighbors as well as their confidence in the government’s handling of the situation.
At a ranch past the undulating rapeseed field that separates the condos from rubble-strewn Huimin Lu — Hui People’s Road — workers at what is one of the few Hui businesses that hasn’t been demolished to make way for high-rises expressed surprise about the mosque dispute, given the area’s history of ethnic mingling.
“We’ve been in these parts a long time,” a worker surnamed Tao, who is not related to the imam, said as he loaded sacks of dried fatty beef. 

“We mind our business and they mind theirs. We don’t stir up trouble and they don’t either.”
But Tao, the imam, seemed to acknowledge a hardening of attitudes toward Muslims in recent years.
“It may be that the situation has grown more sensitive in that place that we all know about,” he said after a pause, referring to but not daring to mention Xinjiang.
Still he tries to not harbor resentment toward the Han protesters.
“I don’t blame the locals because I believe they were influenced,” he said, sitting below framed pictures of him greeting government religious affairs officials. 

“I want them to know Muslims are virtuous people. We are peaceful. We are reasonable. We are tolerant. And we are good Chinese.”