[This campaign represents the newest front in the Chinese Communist Party’s sweeping rollback of individual religious freedoms, after decades of relative openness that allowed more moderate forms of Islam to blossom. The harsh crackdown on Muslims that began with the Uighurs in Xinjiang is spreading to more regions and more groups.]
By
Steven Lee Myers
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Hui
Muslims leaving a mosque in Linxia, a northwestern Chinese city often referred
to as “Little
Mecca.” Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
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YINCHUAN,
China — In China’s
northwest, the government is stripping the most overt expressions of the
Islamic faith from a picturesque valley where most residents are devout
Muslims. The authorities have destroyed domes and minarets on mosques,
including one in a small village near Linxia, a city known as “Little Mecca.”
Similar demolitions have been carried out in
Inner Mongolia, Henan and Ningxia, the homeland of China’s largest Muslim ethnic
minority, the Hui. In the southern province of Yunnan, three mosques were
closed. From Beijing to Ningxia, officials have banned the public use of Arabic
script.
This campaign represents the newest front in
the Chinese Communist Party’s sweeping rollback of individual religious
freedoms, after decades of relative openness that allowed more moderate forms
of Islam to blossom. The harsh crackdown on Muslims that began with the Uighurs
in Xinjiang is spreading to more regions and more groups.
It is driven by the party’s fear that
adherence to the Muslim faith could turn into religious extremism and open
defiance of its rule. Across China, the party is now imposing new restrictions
on Islamic customs and practices, in line with a confidential party directive,
parts of which have been seen by The New York Times.
The measures reflect the hard-line policies
of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has sought to reassert the primacy of the
Communist Party and its ideology in all walks of life.
The campaign has prompted concerns that the
repression of Uighur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang has begun to
bleed into other parts of China, targeting Hui and other Muslims who have been
better integrated than Uighurs into Chinese society. Last year, a top party
official from Ningxia praised Xinjiang's government during a visit there and
pledged to increase cooperation between the two regions on security matters.
Haiyun Ma, a Hui Muslim professor at
Frostburg State University in Maryland, said the crackdown was continuing a
long history of animosity toward Islam in China that has alienated believers.
“The People’s Republic of China has become
the world’s foremost purveyor of anti-Islamic ideology and hate,” he wrote in a
recent essay for the Hudson Institute. “This, in turn, has translated into
broad public support for the Beijing government’s intensifying oppression of
Muslims in the Xinjiang region and elsewhere in the country.”
None of the new measures, so far, have
approached the brutality of Xinjiang’s mass detentions and invasive
surveillance of Uighurs. But they have already stirred anxiety among the Hui,
who number more than 10 million.
“We are now backtracking again,” Cui Haoxin,
a Hui Muslim poet who publishes under the name An Ran, said in an interview in
Jinan, south of Beijing, where he lives.
To Mr. Cui, the methods of repression that
are smothering Uighur society in Xinjiang now loom over all of China. “One day
this model will not only target Muslims,” he said. “Everyone will be harmed by
it.”
‘Sinicization
of Islam’
Islam has had followers in China for
centuries. There are now 22 to 23 million Muslims, a tiny minority in a country
of 1.4 billion. Among them, the Hui and the Uighurs make up the largest ethnic
groups. Uighurs primarily live in Xinjiang, but the Hui live in enclaves
scattered around the nation.
The restrictions they now face can be traced
to 2015, when Mr. Xi first raised the issue of what he called the “Sinicization
of Islam,” saying all faiths should be subordinate to Chinese culture and the
Communist Party. Last year, Mr. Xi’s government issued a confidential directive
that ordered local officials to prevent Islam from interfering with secular
life and the state’s functions.
Critics of China’s policies who are outside
the country provided excerpts from the directive to The Times. The directive,
titled “Reinforcing and Improving Islam Work in the New Situation,” has not
been made public. It was issued by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in April
of last year and classified as confidential for 20 years.
The directive warns against the “Arabization”
of Islamic places, fashions and rituals in China, singling out the influence of
Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, as a cause for concern.
It prohibits the use of the Islamic financial
system. It bars mosques or other private Islamic organizations from organizing
kindergartens or after-school programs, and it forbids Arabic-language schools
to teach religion or send students abroad to study.
The most visible aspect of the crackdown has been
the targeting of mosques built with domes, minarets and other architectural
details characteristic of Central Asia or the Arabic world.
Taken in isolation, some of these measures
seem limited. Others seem capricious: some mosques with Arabic features have
been left untouched, while others nearby have been altered or shut down.
But on a national scale, the trend is clear.
Mr. Cui, the poet, calls it the harshest campaign against faith since the end
of the Cultural Revolution, when so-called Red Guards unleashed by Mao Zedong
destroyed mosques across the country.
Targeting
Domes and Arabic Script
In the state’s view, the spread of Islamic
customs dangerously subverts social and political conformity.
In Ningxia, the provincial government banned
public displays of Arabic script, even removing the word “halal” from the
official seal it distributes to restaurants that follow Islamic customs for
preparing food. The seals now use Chinese characters. That prohibition spread
this summer to Beijing and elsewhere.
The authorities in several provinces have
stopped distributing halal certificates for food, dairy and wheat producers and
restaurants. Chinese state media have described this as an effort to curb a
“pan-halal tendency” in which Islamic standards are being applied, in the
government’s view, to too many types of foods or restaurants.
Ningxia and Gansu have also banned the
traditional call to prayer. Around historical mosques there, prayer times are
now announced with a grating claxon. One imam in Ningxia’s capital, Yinchuan,
said the authorities had recently visited and warned him to make no public
statements on religious matters.
The authorities have also targeted the
mosques themselves. In Gansu, construction workers in Gazhuang, a village near
Linxia, descended on a mosque in April, tearing off its golden dome. It has not
yet reopened. Plainclothes policemen prevented two Times journalists from
entering.
In the southern province of Yunnan, where
there have long been Hui communities, the authorities last December padlocked
mosques in three small villages that had been run without official permission.
There were protests and brief scuffles with the police, to no avail. The county
issued a statement accusing the mosques of holding illegal religious activities
and classes.
In one of the villages, Huihuideng, Ma Jiwu
carried his grandson outside the shuttered local mosque, which had operated
inside a home.
Mr. Ma, wearing the distinctive skullcap that
many Hui wear, said the imams there had ignored warnings to move their services
to the village’s main mosque, where a Chinese flag hangs in the central
courtyard and a large red banner exhorts worshipers, “Love your country, love
your religion.”
“They did not listen,” Mr. Ma said.
Near the main mosque, a woman said the
closing of the smaller one had stirred resentment, but also a feeling of
resignation. She used a Chinese idiom for helplessness against a superior
force, in this case the government: “The arm cannot twist the thigh.”
Xiong Kunxin, a professor of ethnic studies
at Minzu University in Beijing, defended the government’s recent actions. He
said that China’s far-reaching economic changes over the last 40 years had been
accompanied by a loosening of restrictions on religious practice, but that the
laxity had gone too far.
“Now China’s economic development has reached
a certain height,” he said, “and suddenly problems related to religious and
other affairs are being discovered.”
In the case of Islam, he cited the
proliferation of mosques and the spread of “halal” practices into public life,
saying they conflicted with the cultural values of the majority Han Chinese
population.
Official statistics indicate that there are
now more mosques in China than Buddhist temples: 35,000 compared to 33,500. In
the last year, scores of mosques have been altered, closed or destroyed
entirely, many of them in Xinjiang, according to officials and news reports.
‘The
Major Enemy the State Faces’
The party asserts that it has the right to
control all organized religion. Critics ascribe that to its fear that religious
organizations could challenge its political power. In the past, the party’s
repression has triggered violent responses.
In 1975, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution,
the People’s Liberation Army surrounded Shadian, a mostly Hui Muslim town in
Yunnan Province where residents had protested the closure of mosques. Clashes
ensued, prompting a massive military intervention that razed the town and left
more than 1,600 people dead.
The current pressure has also been met with
unrest, though not on that scale. In August 2018 in Weizhou, a village in
Ningxia, protests erupted when the authorities sent demolition workers to a
newly built mosque. After a tense showdown that lasted several days, the local
government promised to suspend the destruction and review the plans.
Nearly a year later, police officers still
block the roads into the village, turning away foreigners, including diplomats
and two Times journalists who tried to visit in May.
China claims that it allows freedom of
religion, but emphasizes that the state must always come first. The Ningxia
government, asked about its recent restrictions on Islam, said that China had
rules on religious practice just like any other country.
Mosques that violate laws such as building
codes will be closed, it said, and schools and universities will not permit
religious activities.
“Arabic is a foreign language,” the
government said about the restrictions on public signage, adding that they had
been imposed “to make things convenient for the general public.”
In an interview, Mr. Ma, the Frostburg State
scholar, said the current leadership viewed religion as “the major enemy the
state faces.” He said senior officials had studied the role played by faith —
particularly the Catholic Church in Poland — in the collapse of the Soviet
Union and its dominion in Eastern Europe.
Believers have little recourse against the
intensifying crackdown. Mr. Ma predicted that it would not relent soon, but
that it would ultimately fail, as other campaigns against Muslims have.
“I really doubt they can eliminate religious
faith,” he said. “That is impossible.”
Follow Steven Lee Myers on Twitter at
@stevenleemyers.
Claire Fu contributed research.
