Uighurs - the victims of Hanification
By Habib Siddiqui
Chairman Mao tried to sell the Marxist-Leninist
thought to solve the ethnic problem in his multi-ethnic country (PRC). Not only
did the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) fail but Mao’s social engineering proved
to be highly destructive. It led to the widespread discrimination and
segregation of the non-Han minorities prevalent today based on their distinct
religion, habitus, physiognomy, language, culture and socioeconomic status.
After the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, the CCP began to
relax its policies towards Muslims in 1978. But its policy of Hanification of
the non-Han
communities via the all-too-familiar colonial-style
settlements and acculturation or a forced assimilation to the dominant Han
culture did not ebb an iota.
The
most vivid example of this experiment is Xinjiang (formerly East Turkestan)
where the Han Communists developed it as a penal colony,
as a nuclear testing ground and dumping ground for radioactive wastes (that is
responsible for unusually high birth defects and mortality rate amongst the
inhabitants) and as a buffer zone against invasion, and as a supplier of raw
materials and living space for an overpopulated country. [Note: In this respect,
Hanification has some resemblance to the Soviet experiment in the
Muslim-majority Central Asia.]
Determined to end the push and pull of centuries,
Mao’s successors resorted to Hanification of Xinjiang, which is primarily
carried out in two folds: settlements and language or culture. They have had changed
the demography of the region by settling the Han Chinese from other parts of
the PRC and conducted forced abortion on Uighur women. Arienne M. Dwyer notes
in an article - The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and
Political Discourse - the Han population “increased from nearly 300,000 in
1953 to nearly 6 million in 1990, in addition to more than one-half million
demobilized soldiers in the Production and Construction Corps.” This increase in
Xinjiang was made possible “as a result of state-sponsored population transfers
from other parts of China.”
A second massive Hanification in the form of
systematic colonization took place in the 1990s soon after the collapse of the
Soviet Empire. Mindful of the emergence of the Central Asian republics (that
are culturally, mostly Turkish), the CCP offered an attractive economic
incentive program called the “Big Development of the Northwest” to the poor
Han-Chinese to transfer them from the underdeveloped areas of the country to the
Muslim-majority territories. The CCP’s
calculated attempts brought success. It brought between one and two million new
Han-Chinese settlers to Xinjiang alone. Today, the Han–Chinese population makes
up more than 40 percent of Xinjiang’s total population of 22 million, from what
was only 6 percent in the early 1950s.
As part of its acculturation strategy, the Han
supremacists curtailed the Xinjiang’s millennium-plus-years old rich Muslim
culture and are practicing widespread religious repression against the ethnic
Uighurs (also
spelled Uyghur).
They have closed down Qur’anic and Uighur language schools to cut down their
Islamic and cultural ties with other Muslims. Because of the Mandarin-based
educational policy of the state, the Uighurs can’t pass and find jobs in their
own land. The party-state has institutionalized discrimination
based on Uighur’s distinct religion, habitus, physiognomy, language culture and
socioeconomic status. In so doing, they have only widened the gap between the
settlers and the indigenous inhabitants.
Since the 1950s, successive Chinese political
leaderships have systematically formulated policies and carefully implemented
action plans to ensure the total de-empowerment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang:
politically, socially and economically. [Interested readers may like to read
the article: China’s Hanification of Xinjiang is Failing By Habib Siddiqui
and A.R.M. Imtiyaz]
In
January 2019, Beijing passed a new Draconian law that seeks to "Sinicize" Islam. The campaign to “Sinicize
religion” – the third form of Hanification – actually began in 2015 when
President Xi Jinping passed a policy to bring religions in line with Chinese
culture and the CCP. The law criminalized any expression of dissent or religious belief on
behalf of Uyghurs alongside with branding
their cultural traditions as signs of radicalization and terrorism. In
October 2016, the government declared that all Xinjiang residents need to
submit their documents for review to the Public Security Bureau (PSB), with the
intention of limiting their travel outside the country. As a result of that,
many students who pursued education abroad were forcefully returned and
disappeared upon arrival at the Chinese border since their loyalty to the
People’s Party was questioned. In addition to that, throughout the province,
smartphone owners found their phones inspected for suspicious content or
undesirable social media applications, as a result of which many of them
reportedly got installed bug- and tracking devices or spyware. Surveillance
cameras were also updated with face recognition software, which facilitated the
identification of individuals at crowded places. In South-eastern Xinjiang,
authorities have ordered all vehicles to have compulsory GPS trackers
installed, for what they call a ‘comprehensive supervision’. These and
various other stringent security measures established the legislative
foundation for the State’s repressive policies in the following years.
While Islam
is one of the five officially recognized religions in China, the Han Chinese
leadership began to show its unease toward Islam as well as Christianity soon after
9/11. The latest phase of taking down Arabic script and Islamic symbols, including those from halal restaurants and food
stalls, represents an escalation in the Sinicization of Islam, especially in major
cities like Beijing with high Hui Muslim population.
The new law, symbolizing Han anti-Muslim supremacist
assaults, has led to painful experience for tens of millions of Chinese
Muslims, especially the Uighur and Hui Muslims. Hundreds of Muslim
intellectuals have either been executed or simply disappeared in the Chinese Gulag.
One of those academics is Tashpolat Tiyip, a Uighur Muslim. Until 2017 he was a model
academic, head of Xinjiang University, globally connected, and with an honorary
degree from a prestigious Paris university. But that year, without warning, he disappeared, with no word
from officials. His friends believe that after a secret trial, Prof Tiyip was
convicted of separatism and sentenced to death.
As I noted in an earlier
article, Professor
Tiyip is not the only academic to disappear in the Chinese Gulag. Among the first high profile arrests was economist Ilham
Tohti, another Uighur Muslim, who was convicted of separatism and sentenced to life in prison in 2014. Last month
(Sept. 2019), he
was awarded the Council of Europe's Vaclaw Havel Prize for human rights. Another example is anthropologist Rahile Dawut, also
of Xinjiang University. She disappeared in late 2017
and has not been heard of since.
According to Michael Caster, a researcher and
author of The People's Republic of the
Disappeared, "There are hundreds
of Uighur academics and professionals swept up into this mass internment
campaign." "This is targeting community, cultural, and
intellectual leaders; it is tantamount to cultural genocide."
One of the latest strategies towards cementing Han
supremacy is the building of detention camps, which are being branded as “re-education
centres”, and undeniably further deteriorate the situation by
disenfranchising the local population. The epithet, “re-education camps” has
been given to internment
camps, which have been operating secretly and unlawfully since 2016.
In 2018 a United Nations
committee estimated that
about 1 million Muslims — mostly ethnic Uighurs but also other Muslim minorities
— were being “held incommunicado” in Xinjiang without “being charged or tried,
under the pretext of countering terrorism and religious extremism.” Experts say
the Turkic minorities are being subjected to intense political indoctrination,
forced confessions and intimidation. Dr. Adrian Zenz, an academic, whose research focus
is on China’s ethnic policy and public recruitment in Tibetan regions and
Xinjiang, argues that these mass camps are indiscriminately subjecting Uyghur
Muslims to extrajudicial inhumane, humiliating and brainwashing conditions,
supposedly as an attempt of lecturing the detainees how to distinguish the
so-called ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ religious practices,
traditions and behavior.
Dr. Sean R. Roberts, Director of the International
Development Studies Program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of
International Affairs and expert on Central Asia and China, has characterized
Beijing’s perception of the Uyghurs as a “biological threat to society, akin
to a virus that must be eradicated, quarantined, or cleansed from those it
infects”. He explains how such attitude generates an environment similar to
Michael Foucault’s all-seeing Panopticon or George Orwell’s Surveillance
Society, where every single move or word of the individual is being monitored,
rendering a milieu where surveillance remains the norm, even if the person
discontinues his/her actions.
In a recently
published article - Ethnic Cleansing of
Uyghur Identity by China – the European
Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS) notes, “China’s campaign of coercive social re-engineering, justified
under the slogan of “war on terror”, clearly comes closer to “war on
humankind”. Such violent repression inevitably appears counter-productive,
since it evokes even more violent resistance on behalf of the Uyghurs, which
eventually leads to more repressive security measures on behalf of Beijing.
Therefore, such perpetual cycle of repression-violence-repression only
contributes to the complete disintegration of relations between the Chinese and
the Uyghurs, rendering their peaceful habitation practically impossible.”
The latest reports suggest that some 3 million
Uighurs are being detained in China’s concentration camps, making them the
largest group since Nazi Germany. They are facing what can surely be termed as ‘cultural genocide.’ Muslims cannot fast
during Ramadan and are forced to eat pork, which is considered haram in Islam. In recent months, scores
of mosques
have also been razed to the ground at the behest of the PRC government. Among the sites completely destroyed was the Imam Asim
shrine, which used to attract thousands of Uighur pilgrims each year. Its
mosque and other buildings have been torn down and only the tomb remained, the
Guardian reported.
Muslims
caught praying, fasting, growing a beard or wearing a hijab, a headscarf worn
by many Muslim women who feel it is part of their religion, face the threat of
arrest. According to the Human Rights Watch, Beijing keeps a database of "DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans and blood
types of all residents between the age of 12 and 16" in Xinjiang. Many
Uighurs are now feared to have vanished – either killed or held in detention camps by the Chinese authorities.
Succinctly
put, President Xi
Jinping’s communist regime has proven to be anti-Muslim, supremacist, sadistic
and brutally serious about Hanification of the entire country. Under his authoritarian
rule, PRC has become a state of, for and by the Han Chinese via
the all-too-obvious supremacist Hanification process.
Thus, the
disappearance and detention of more than a million Uighurs in Xinjiang who are
victims of one of the worst forms of persecution and face a socio-economic-cultural
genocide today in their ancestral land with their rights robbed and mutilated are
all part of a statist project to cementing Han racial supremacy, and colonizing,
minoritizing and securitizing them by every possible means. The
sad reality is with the Chinese veto power in the UN and its enormous economic
muscle (second only to the USA), the likelihood of securing the level
of international cooperation needed to either punish the Han supremacists or
change their criminally repugnant policy remains very low.
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