[The 22 million followers of Islam are not the only people touched by China’s assimilation drive. Christian church steeples and crosses have been taken down across the country. When party bosses inspected Tibetan regions in August, they told local officials to implement Xi’s “important words on religious work,” tighten control over monasteries and “focus efforts to Sinicize religion.”]
By
Gerry Shih
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Hui
Muslim men leave the Laohuasi mosque after Friday prayers in Linxia, in
China's
Gansu province, in 2018. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
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LINXIA,
China — Worrying signs first
emerged two years ago in this Muslim pocket in China’s heartland. Calls to
prayer, once broadcast from local mosques, fell silent. The Koran, banned from
sale, vanished from bookstores.
Members of the Hui minority, who number 10
million, hoped that the state crackdown would not arrive here, in the fertile
valleys and loess hills of Gansu province, as it had in Xinjiang, the homeland
of the other major Muslim ethnic group in China, the Uighurs.
Hope faded in April. Government cranes began
appearing ominously over Hui mosques. A video surfaced on social media showing
workers taking apart the Gazhuang mosque’s gold dome, then smashing it into the
prayer hall. Local Hui saw an unmistakable metaphor: The Communist Party, which
once handled religious life here with a light touch, now ran roughshod over it
“Women were crying; others, like me, couldn’t
believe what was happening,” said Ma Ha, a 40-year-old owner of a noodle shop.
“We had 40 years of religious freedom. The winds are changing.”
Under its leader, Xi Jinping, China’s
government has intensified efforts to assimilate ethnic minorities and curtail
religions, such as Islam, that it considers carriers of foreign influence. For
two years on the Xinjiang frontier, China has sent hundreds of thousands,
possibly millions, of Uighurs to what it calls reeducation centers, where they
are taught to renounce their religion and culture and embrace new
state-prescribed identities as secular Chinese.
That tide of “Sinicization,” as Chinese
policymakers call it, is surging nationwide. A recent, unescorted trip through
Gansu, a corridor that once ushered Silk Road caravans and Islam into imperial
China, revealed an accelerating campaign to assimilate another Muslim minority,
the Hui, a Chinese-speaking people with no recent record of separatism or
extremism.
The campaign targeting the Hui does not
feature mass internment or pervasive digital surveillance, the most striking
aspects of the Xinjiang crackdown. But it is a purge of ideas, symbols,
culture, products — anything deemed not Chinese. It permeates life, in ways
existential and mundane.
Chinese database tracks apps, car location
and even electricity usage in Muslim region
Domes and minarets are lopped off mosques and
replaced with curving Chinese roofs. News broadcasts are forbidden to show
pedestrians wearing traditional Hui skullcaps or veils. Arabic script is outlawed
in public spaces, so practically every restaurant has a sun-beaten facade with
dark traces where the word “halal” has been scraped off.
Strict new quotas throttle religious
education to the degree that some Hui intellectuals predict their people could
become largely irreligious, like most of China, in two or three generations.
Pressures are mounting against the Hui, the
distant descendants of Persian traders, at a moment when the Communist
leadership is stoking nationalism among the ethnic majority Han to bolster
popular support. In officials’ speeches, on television and across billboards,
one frequent refrain is the “China Dream” — Xi’s vision of restoring China’s
historic power and wealth, its culture and its pride.
“The great rejuvenation of the Chinese people
is actually a narrow-minded, xenophobic kind of nationalism,” said Li Yunfei,
an imam from eastern China and one of the last dissident Hui writers. “Anything
that is defined by them as coming from abroad, they strive to eliminate through
administrative means.”
An April 2018 Communist Party directive
obtained by the Germany-based World Uighur Congress advocacy group showed the
party’s central leadership instructing local authorities to reverse what it
deemed to be growing “Saudi” and “Arab” influences in architecture, clothing,
religious practice and language.
Although the contents of the directive were
confidential, government offices nationwide have issued general statements
confirming they were implementing its orders.
The 22 million followers of Islam are not the
only people touched by China’s assimilation drive. Christian church steeples
and crosses have been taken down across the country. When party bosses
inspected Tibetan regions in August, they told local officials to implement Xi’s
“important words on religious work,” tighten control over monasteries and
“focus efforts to Sinicize religion.”
Ambitious social re-engineering will be seen
as one of Xi’s legacies, said Vanessa Frangville, a professor of Chinese
studies at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
By curbing religion, the party “removes
potential opponents to power,” Frangville said. “To control the whole
population through technology and ideology — it’s what leaders dream about.”
'We've
regressed 40 years'
For centuries, Gansu was a land of
transition. In the hills where the Tibetan highlands flatten into prairie,
sprawling Tibetan monasteries exerted a greater gravity than the emperors of
faraway Beijing. In the Daxia River valley, Sufi preachers and devout warlords
had turned an old Silk Road hub called Linxia into a Hui bastion decades before
communists swept through in 1949.
Today, Beijing wants to make its influence
felt.
On a recent morning, a local imam ushered a
visitor past a flagpole with a flapping red Chinese banner that officials
insisted on installing earlier this year. Along a courtyard wall, propaganda
bulletins reminded worshipers of their foremost loyalty: the communist state
before Allah.
“Islam has been in China 1,300 years. Other
than 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, it’s always been passed down
generation to generation without a break,” said the imam, who, like almost
everyone in Gansu, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of government
retribution. “We’ve regressed 40 years to the Cultural Revolution.”
Sitting in his classroom, where the number of
religious students had plunged 90 percent in one year as new quotas took
effect, the imam spoke about how the Koran was banned from sale and local
publishers who printed the hadith — collections of the prophet Muhammad’s
sayings — were jailed.
[Angry over campus speech by Uighur activist, Chinese students in Canada contact their consulate, film presentation]
Most destabilizing, the imam said, was the
sense of foreboding.
Hui officials felt unsure about how to please
the central government, so they erred on the side of caution, the imam said.
Everybody else — from wealthy Hui businessmen to poor farmers — felt
“completely paralyzed,” he said.
“The Xinjiang policy is already being implemented
here. At least we’re moving in that direction,” the imam said. “We’re born and
raised Chinese. Our passports are Chinese. Our forefathers are Chinese. How do
you want us to be more Chinese?”
Down an alley from Linxia’s Binhe mosque, one
of at least three in the city facing what officials euphemistically call
“renovation,” a day laborer named Ma Junyi seemed strained as he spoke about
the shifting sands.
Residents were uneasy about new restrictions
that cut the madrassa’s class sizes down to 30 — a quota enforced by random
checks, Ma said. Youngsters under 18, such as his 9-year-old daughter, were
forbidden to set foot inside the mosque courtyard.
“We know leaders have their reasons,” Ma
said. “But how can we pass on our traditions? It feels like we’re going
extinct.”
An
American model
In 2008 and 2009, China was rocked by race
riots in Tibet and Xinjiang that left hundreds of Han, Uighurs and Tibetans
dead.
In the following years, a remarkably open
discussion about China’s ethnic policy flourished on campuses, in journals,
even on television. Two of the most influential voices were Hu Angang, a
conservative intellectual at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Hu Lianhe, a
midcareer official who later soared through the Communist Party ranks.
In 2011, the two Hus, who are not related,
teamed up to publish essays critiquing long-standing policies that recognized
China’s 55 ethnic minorities, offered them preferential treatment on matters
such as college admissions, and carved out regions where peoples such as
Uighurs and Tibetans lived with some autonomy.
The Hus pointed out that religious and
ethno-nationalist impulses played a role in the demise of the Soviet Union — a
cautionary tale that the Chinese Communist Party studies obsessively. They
called for an “upgrade” of the policies and pointed to a model that they
thought China should consider: the United States.
“The early melting pot policy . . .
was a powerful ‘Anglo-Saxonization’ policy, mainly assimilating other ethnic
groups into Anglo-Protestant groups,” they wrote in a paper that traced waves
of U.S. immigration from southern Europe and later Latin America. “Although the
norms of pluralism have become very strong in recent years, the fact remains
that ethnic differences are tending to disappear.”
China celebrates ‘very happy lives’ in
Xinjiang, after detaining 1 million Uighurs
The articles sparked controversy in China.
But today, they are the most-cited papers on the subject, said Hu Angang. They
helped propel Hu Lianhe to become a top official; last year, he defended
China’s Xinjiang policy before a United Nations panel in Geneva.
In an interview and in emails, Hu Angang said
his ideas were often misunderstood in the West. He did not espouse forced
assimilation, he said, but the wisdom of China’s ethnic policies was proved by
data showing the standard of development in Xinjiang and Tibet outstripping
neighboring countries stricken by poverty and chaos.
“Ethnic harmony and social stability are the
greatest, most important public good, but invisible and intangible like fresh
air.”
A
quiet demise
Weeks after Linxia was stunned by the video
of grieving worshipers wailing next to their crushed Gazhuang mosque, a retired
village party secretary sat in a nearby farmhouse picking at a plate of stewed
chicken.
Was China cracking down on Islam? Nonsense,
he said.
First, he said, the Linxia government is
paying to rebuild the Gazhuang mosque — with a Chinese-style roof. Workers did
drop the dome, but it was an accident. And the video that went viral was
uploaded by mischievous young Hui who have since been punished with 24-hour
detention and released. The party was not only beneficent, he said, but also
lenient.
“Why is a dome so important?” the official
said as he shuffled to a coat rack and removed his Hui skullcap in favor of a
sun hat. “I can swap out my hat. You can swap out a dome. The government’s not
saying you can’t be Muslim, or forcing you to be Buddhist or Christian!”
Residents had voiced worries about the
direction things were headed, he conceded, but quickly dismissed the thought.
“I tell the people they need to trust me, we are not in danger,” he said. “And
the people trust me.”
The bottom line was that China had the right
to do things its way, he said.
“How can Americans possibly lecture China
about religious freedom?” he said. “How many Muslims has America killed in Iraq
and Afghanistan? If you ask the Muslim world if they prefer America or China, I
believe they would say China.”
In a high-rise near Linxia’s modest downtown,
Suleiman, a 30-something public-sector employee, said local government
officials and Communist Party members, most of whom are Hui, were caught in a
particular bind.
Party members and civil servants are
prohibited from making hajj pilgrimages, the obligation of every Muslim,
according to Suleiman. Linxia city employees cannot be seen praying, and Hui
contractors are asked to take off skullcaps when they meet officials for city
business.
Suleiman said the government policies seemed
almost mild compared with rhetoric on Chinese social media, where popular Han
nationalist accounts often sound warnings about sharia law, halal food and
other alleged Islamic conspiracies corrupting Chinese society.
Chinese Christians are also under pressure
from the state, Suleiman said, but there seemed to be no widespread antipathy
toward Christians, no explosive potential.
[In Central Asia’s forbidding highlands, a quiet newcomer: Chinese troops]
“I’m afraid someday there will be mass movement against Muslims,” he said. “I’m terrified, because China has been easily gripped by mass movements since ancient times.”
“I’m afraid someday there will be mass movement against Muslims,” he said. “I’m terrified, because China has been easily gripped by mass movements since ancient times.”
To journey through Linxia, where eight great
mosques, a bazaar and warlord estates once composed the center of Hui life, is
to see the Sinicization campaign unfolding with a meticulous logic.
Along the highway approaching the city, a
wall of black tarp perfectly blocks drivers from seeing the Jiajianan mosque’s
minarets being pruned in the distance. On the main commercial avenue, officials
covered up Islamic arches with stone slabs featuring a Chinese motif,
chrysanthemum flowers. In a government-run museum, curators removed skullcaps
and headscarves from mannequins in an exhibit on Hui culture.
In the next room, an exhibit on local history
celebrates how the region’s mosques were rebuilt during the 1980s. It omits a
piece of context: Many were razed earlier, in 1957, by communist zealots during
a mass frenzy whipped up by Chairman Mao Zedong.
The Hui in Gansu today do not suffer
violence, only a quiet demise, Suleiman said: “They’re slowly boiling us like
frogs.”
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