Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
I hope Trump nukes China. I suppose China is consistent about being anti religion and Islam. Where as the West loves and hates religion and Islam. Maybe killing all the commies in the West would fix the problem. Are commies groups of separate species different from conservatives?
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Karl
I hope Trump nukes China. I suppose China is consistent about being anti religion and Islam. Where as the West loves and hates religion and Islam. Maybe killing all the commies in the West would fix the problem. Are commies groups of separate species different from conservatives?
If Trump nukes China the Muslims therein would die too
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Salaam
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Karl
I hope Trump nukes China. I suppose China is consistent about being anti religion and Islam. Where as the West loves and hates religion and Islam. Maybe killing all the commies in the West would fix the problem. Are commies groups of separate species different from conservatives?
^o)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTEYjpBCksY
I think your idea would be categorised as a 'bad' idea.
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Quote:
Originally Posted by
JustTime
If Trump nukes China the Muslims therein would die too
It's just a white mans way of letting off steam. I don't really mean it. China has the most fertile land in the world so nuking it would be unforgiveable. And the pandas are so cute, how could anyone kill them? Passive resistance by Muslims would be the best option because if the state feels threatened it will destroy it's enemies. China is collaborating with Agenda 21 as they are forcing rural rustic inhabitants who prefer to live a pre-industrial unpolluted quiet and simple life into modern polluted noisy Western style cities.
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Salaam
Related
China’s strategy to deal with Uighur fighters fleeing Syria and Iraq
China is moving on multiple fronts to pre-empt in the short-term Uighur foreign fighters fleeing Syria and Iraq from reasserting themselves in Central Asia and longer term prevent the emergence of an ever more vocal Diaspora like what Tibetans have achieved.
The multi-pronged Chinese approach involves weaving Afghanistan more firmly into the fabric of China’s Belt and Road initiative, potentially establishing China’s first land-locked foreign military base, forcing repatriation of Uighurs abroad and preventing Uighur residents of Xinjiang from travelling abroad without first having been re-educated.
Already Afghanistan’s largest investor with a $3 billion, 30-year lease of a copper mine, China is seeking to link the country to its $50 billion plus investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in a bid to stabilize the Central Asian nation and stop Uighur fighters from regrouping in the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip on Afghanistan’s 76-klimoetre long border with China.
The Chinese campaign to squash the emergence of a more effective Uighur Diaspora is partly driven by a desire not to allow Uighurs to follow the example of exile Tibetans who aided by the voice of the Dalai Lama have created a vocal opposition-in-exile.
Estimates of the number of Uyghurs in Syria and Iraq, who earned a reputation on par with that of their battle-hardened Chechen counterparts, range from five to ten thousand. Many paid thousands of dollars to smugglers who helped them make their way to the Middle East. They came in all shades, some deeply religious, others more nationalistic, all embittered by repression in Xinjiang and what they saw as an effort to erase their Uighur identity at whatever price.
A majority saw their participation in battles far from home as a training for the struggle they really cared about: China’s strategic Xinjiang province. “We didn’t care how the fighting went or who Assad was. We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China,” a Uighur fighter told a reporter last month.
US officials have been tracking a trek of Islamic State fighters into north and eastern Afghanistan, believed by Afghan officials to number 3,000. US and Afghan concerns were boosted by a recent report by the Institute for the Study of War that Afghanistan had again emerged as ”a safe haven for terrorist plots.” It isn’t clear how many Uighurs may be among those that made their way to Central Asia.
A video released last month by the Turkistan Islamic Party, a group affiliated with Al Qaeda that played a key role in the 2015 capture of the Syrian province of Idlib, showed Uighur and Taliban fighters overrunning remote Afghan military outposts in mountainous terrain, killing or capturing Afghan troops, and using seized US-made Humvees.
China has denied reports by Afghan officials that it was helping build a military facility in Wakhan that could be used by Chinese forces. Local residents, nonetheless, reported having seen joint Afghan-Chinese patrols in the area while China affirms that it has provided Afghanistan $70 million in military aid in the last three years and is helping the country with capacity-building.
China appeared in December to have persuaded Pakistan and Afghanistan to engage in a wide-ranging dialogue designed to reduce differences between them and facilitate Afghanistan’s closer affiliation with CPEC and the Belt and Road. However, three months later, little progress appears to have been achieved.
China is moving on multiple fronts to pre-empt in the short-term Uighur foreign fighters fleeing Syria and Iraq from reasserting themselves in Central Asia and longer term prevent the emergence of an ever more vocal Diaspora like what Tibetans have achieved.
Meanwhile, Chinese has sought to physically reduce the Uighur Diaspora by persuading countries like Egypt, Thailand and Vietnam to either detain or forcibly return overseas Uighurs. Malaysia has been mulling for months a Chinese demand for the extradition of 11 Uyghurs who made their way to the southeast Asian nation after escaping from a Thai detention centre. In France, Chinese police have demanded that Uighurs hand over personal information, photos, and identity documents — and in some cases, the personal information of their French spouses. The police contacted Uighurs directly via phone or WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, or have paid visits to their family members in China, asking relatives to convey their demands.
Uighurs in the United States, Turkey, Australia, and Egypt who failed to respond to demands like those made of French Uighurs have been ordered to return to China. Some, who returned, often to avoid repercussions for their families, have been arrested. Others are reported to have disappeared.
Major political parties and business organizations in Gilgit-Baltistan have threatened to shut down the Pakistan-China border if Beijing does not release some 50 Uighur women married to Pakistani men from the region, who have been detained in Xinjiang. The province’s legislative assembly unanimously called on the government in Islamabad to take up the issue.
The women, many of whom are practicing Muslims and done religious attire, are believed to have been detained in re-education camps for the past year. Hundreds, if not thousands of Uighurs in Xinjiang itself have been forced into re-education camps without due process as part of the rollout in Xinjiang of the world’s most intrusive and repressive public surveillance system.
China appeared in December to have persuaded Pakistan and Afghanistan to engage in a wide-ranging dialogue designed to reduce differences between them and facilitate Afghanistan’s closer affiliation with CPEC and the Belt and Road.
The system involves cameras on streets equipped with facial recognition software and a DNA database that ultimately will include all residents. The database categorizes them as safe or unsafe. ID readers at bus stops, train stations, and shopping malls were being installed to ensure that those deemed unsafe are barred entry.
Authorities in at least one autonomous prefecture in Xinjiang have added ‘interest in travel abroad’ to the list of reasons for detaining Uighurs and dispatching them to re-education camps. The Chinese campaign to squash the emergence of a more effective Uighur Diaspora is partly driven by a desire not to allow Uighurs to follow the example of exile Tibetans who aided by the voice of the Dalai Lama have created a vocal opposition-in-exile.
It is also fuelled by the fact that many of those who initially fled Xinjiang to escape repression and marginalization and build a better life elsewhere were aided once they left China by militants who steered them towards the Middle East and Islamic militancy. Said a Chinese official: “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. Re-educating these people is like spraying chemicals on the crops. That is why it is a general re-education, not limited to a few people.”
https://www.globalvillagespace.com/china-moves-to-counter-violent-and-non-violent-expressions-of-uighur-identity/
Related
https://www.islamicboard.com/business-amp-islamic-finance/134349732-chinas-trillion-dollar-plan-dominate-global-trade.html
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Quote:
Originally Posted by
AllahIsAl-Malik
How can any Muslims defend communism?
If you can take some of their ideas and apply them from an Islamic standpoint, I don't think that is wrong. For example, I have a book by Imran Hosein where he mentions a strategy of Mao.
Some of them have interesting things to say. For example, Che had some interesting things to say. Fidel said some true things. Mao had some interesting ideas. I read Lenin's book on imperialism and I liked it.
But unless you are taking bits and pieces and removing everything that goes against Islam, I don't think we should be for communism.
If Marx wants to critique capitalism, I don't really care. He might have had some points.
In Somalia, they had a mixture of socialism and Islam. In Latin America, they had theology of liberation where they were Christian socialists.
I think that sort of thing sounds intriguing. As long as Muslims are Muslims who happen to be curious about Marx and who reject everything that goes against Islam, I don't think it's wrong.
But if that's the approach, I think we should be fiercely attacking Marx wherever he goes against Islam.
The other thing is you would have to seriously know Islam very, very well and be very rooted in Islamic knowledge to make sure that nothing that goes against Islam is accepted.
But communism in the Chinese form where they are trying to force atheism on people... that is wrong. That the Chinese communists are oppressing Muslims is wrong and makes me angry. I think there might be something interesting if Marx is reinterpreted from an Islamic point of view, whatever grains of truth he presents are shown and wherever he is wrong he is fiercely attacked. But honestly, Islam has zakat and so there's already a form of socialism built into it. And reading Marx could be dangerous. I think only from a very firm foundation of Islamic knowledge would it be reasonable to try to dig and find what okay ideas he has. But what is unquestionable I think is that standard, atheistic communism is evil and should be fiercely opposed. I am disgusted and by China's oppression of Muslims. It makes me sad because how can China claim to be following Lenin? Lenin did write a book that I really liked called "Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism"... how can China claim to be anti-imperialist, have criticized the Soviets for imperialism and then impose imperialism on Muslims? And if Lenin himself forced atheism then he went against what he himself claimed to stand for.
I feel like we are living in 1984 where the banner of anti-imperialism is carried by people who themselves are imperialists a la 1984's concept of DoubleSpeak.
same way you can defend a monarchy!
also how is an arabic name an islamic name? a lot of people in Indonesia don't have Islamic names, does that make them any less muslim?
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Quote:
Originally Posted by
rebelutionary
same way you can defend a monarchy!
also how is an arabic name an islamic name? a lot of people in Indonesia don't have Islamic names, does that make them any less muslim?
Communism and Islam are incompatible whereas Monarchy does flow with Islam, the Caliphate system itself is a monarchy.
If you are saying this out of ignorance you should repent, however if you disagree, know you are outside the fold of Islam and Communism is kufr.
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
last year, in ramadan, china police compelled Muslims to break siyam (fasting). may Allah destroy china. -amin
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Quote:
Originally Posted by
JustTime
Communism and Islam are incompatible whereas Monarchy does flow with Islam, the Caliphate system itself is a monarchy.
If you are saying this out of ignorance you should repent, however if you disagree, know you are outside the fold of Islam and Communism is kufr.
Asalamu Alaikum
The Caliphate is not a monarchy, case in point, you've had Turks take the mantle.
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Salaam
Another update, can anybody confirm what they are saying is on the subtitles?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4GJSRVFe-Q
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Salaam
Another update
a response.
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Quote:
Originally Posted by
JustTime
Communism and Islam are incompatible whereas Monarchy does flow with Islam, the Caliphate system itself is a monarchy.
If you are saying this out of ignorance you should repent, however if you disagree, know you are outside the fold of Islam and Communism is kufr.
If communism is Kufr, then so is a monarchy, do you know how you have to praise the king?
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Salaam
This is apalling!
Shes clearly being coerced, look at the misery on her face :(
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Uyghur mother's plea: "What about the oppressed Uyghur Muslims of #EastTurkestan?"
https://www.facebook.com/doamuslims/...9936031387292/
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Quote:
Originally Posted by
rebelutionary
same way you can defend a monarchy!
also how is an arabic name an islamic name? a lot of people in Indonesia don't have Islamic names, does that make them any less muslim?
Where did I say anything about monarchies or Arabic names?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Karl
It's just a white mans way of letting off steam. I don't really mean it. China has the most fertile land in the world so nuking it would be unforgiveable. And the pandas are so cute, how could anyone kill them? Passive resistance by Muslims would be the best option because if the state feels threatened it will destroy it's enemies. China is collaborating with Agenda 21 as they are forcing rural rustic inhabitants who prefer to live a pre-industrial unpolluted quiet and simple life into modern polluted noisy Western style cities.
Being white doesn't entitle you to casually make genocidal threats. I believe that white people are human so I believe they're capable of abstaining from such grotesque behavior.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Junon
Salaam
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Junon
This is apalling!
Shes clearly being coerced, look at the misery on her face :(
Wow that's depressing. I honestly feel almost violent watching that. It seriously disturbs me to see that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
JustTime
Communism and Islam are incompatible whereas Monarchy does flow with Islam, the Caliphate system itself is a monarchy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
JustTime
If you are saying this out of ignorance you should repent, however if you disagree, know you are outside the fold of Islam and Communism is kufr.
Yes, Communism is kufr.
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
This is horribe!!! May Allah Al Muntaqim defeat the wicked Chinese Government and all enemies of Muslims and Islam. These oppressed people should recite duas from The Quran and hadith to defeat oppressors and also certain names of Allah.
- - - Updated - - -
The (Western) media makes it seem like Muslims are attacking others but all over the world, Muslims are the ones under attack.
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Salaam
Another update. Wonder what game the sociopaths at the Economist is playing? Doubt they care about the plight of the Uighurs. More likely elite conflict amongst the globalists.
Nevertheless a informative article.
China has turned Xinjiang into a police state like no other
Totalitarian determination and modern technology have produced a massive abuse of human rights
“THE prophet Sulayman approached his son and said to him, ‘I have received a message from God. I want you to circle the Earth and see if there are more people who are alive in spirit or more people who are dead in spirit.’ After a period the son returned and said, ‘Father I went to many places and everywhere I went I saw more people who were dead than those who were alive.’”
Hasan shared that message on a WeChat social-messaging group in 2015, when he was 23. Born in Yarkand, a town in southern Xinjiang, Hasan had moved to the provincial capital, Urumqi, to sell jade and shoes and to learn more about Islam. He described himself to Darren Byler, an anthropologist from the University of Washington, as a Sufi wanderer, a pious man with a wife and small daughter, who prayed five times a day and disapproved of dancing and immodesty.
But in January 2015 the provincial government was demanding that everyone in Urumqi return to their native home to get a new identity card. “I am being forced to go back,” Hasan complained to Mr Byler. “The Yarkand police are calling me every day. They are making my parents call me and tell me the same thing.” Eventually, he and his family boarded a bus for the 20-hour journey home. It was hit by a truck. Hasan’s wife and daughter were killed. He was hospitalised. “It was the will of Allah,” he said.
Hasan hoped the authorities would allow him to return to Urumqi because of his injuries. No chance. Having lost wife, child and livelihood, Hasan lost his liberty, too. A fortnight after his accident, he was sent to a re-education camp for an indefinite period. There, for all his relatives know, he remains.
Hasan is one of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-language people, who have disappeared in Xinjiang, China’s north-western province. It is an empty, far-flung place; Hasan’s home town of Yarkand is as close to Baghdad as it is to Beijing. It is also a crucial one. The region is China’s biggest domestic producer of oil and gas, and much of the fuel imported from Central Asia and Russia passes through on its way to the industries of the east coast. It is now a vital link in the Belt and Road Initiative, a foreign policy which aims to bind the Middle East and Europe to China with ties of infrastructure, investment and trade.
But on top of that it is the home of the Uighurs, the largest Muslim group in the country, and ethnically quite distinct from the Han Chinese. A recent history of Uighur unrest—in particular bloody inter-ethnic violence in Urumqi in 2009 that followed the murder of Uighurs elsewhere in China—and subsequent terrorism have sent the government’s repressive tendencies into overdrive. Under a new party boss, Chen Quanguo, appointed in 2016, the provincial government has vastly increased the money and effort it puts into controlling the activities and patrolling the beliefs of the Uighur population. Its regime is racist, uncaring and totalitarian, in the sense of aiming to affect every aspect of people’s lives. It has created a fully-fledged police state. And it is committing some of the most extensive, and neglected, human-rights violations in the world.
The not-quite-Gulag archipelago
The government is building hundreds or thousands of unacknowledged re-education camps to which Uighurs can be sent for any reason or for none. In some of them day-to-day conditions do not appear to be physically abusive as much as creepy. One released prisoner has said he was not permitted to eat until he had thanked Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, and the Communist Party. But there have been reports of torture at others. In January, 82-year-old Muhammad Salih Hajim, a respected religious scholar, died in detention in Urumqi.
Kashgar, the largest Uighur city, has four camps, of which the largest is in Number 5 Middle School. A local security chief said in 2017 that “approximately 120,000” people were being held in the city. In Korla, in the middle of the province, a security official recently said the camps are so full that officials in them are begging the police to stop bringing people.
As a result, more and more camps are being built: the re-education archipelago is adding islands even faster than the South China Sea. Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Kortal, Germany, has looked at procurement contracts for 73 re-education camps. He found their total cost to have been 682m yuan ($108m), almost all spent since April 2017. Records from Akto, a county near the border with Kyrgyzstan, say it spent 9.6% of its budget on security (including camps) in 2017. In 2016 spending on security in the province was five times what it had been in 2007. By the end of 2017 it was ten times that: 59bn yuan.
For all this activity, the government has not officially confirmed that the camps exist. They are not governed by any judicial process; detentions are on the orders of the police or party officials, not the verdict of a court. A woman working as an undertaker was imprisoned for washing bodies according to Islamic custom. Thirty residents of Ili, a town near the Kazakh border, were detained “because they were suspected of wanting to travel abroad,” according to the local security chief. Other offences have included holding strong religious views, allowing others to preach religion, asking where one’s relatives are and failing to recite the national anthem in Chinese.
A significant chunk of the total Uighur population is interned in this way. If the rate of detention in Kashgar applied to the province as a whole, 5% of the Uighur population of 10m would be detained. Other evidence suggests that this is quite possible. In February Radio Free Asia (RFA), a broadcaster financed by an independent agency of the American government, cold-called 11 families at random in Araltobe, in the north of the province, far from the Uighurs’ heartland. Six said family members had been sent to camps. In a village later visited by Agence France Presse in Qaraqash county, near Hotan, a fifth of adults had been detained over four months.
Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, reckons the overall number detained may be 800,000. Timothy Grose, a professor at Rose-Hulman University in Indiana, puts the total between 500,000 and 1m, which would imply that something like a sixth to a third of young and middle-aged Uighur men are being detained, or have been at some point in the past year.
The Chinese government argues that harsh measures are needed to prevent violence associated with Uighur separatism. In 2013 a Uighur suicide-driver crashed his car into pedestrians in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. In 2014 a knife-wielding Uighur gang slaughtered 31 travellers at a train station in Kunming, Yunnan province, an incident some in China compared to the September 11th 2001 attacks on America. Unrest in Yarkand later that year led to a hundred deaths; an attack at a coal mine in Aksu killed 50 people. Kyrgyzstani authorities blamed Uighur terrorists for an attempt to blow up the Chinese embassy in Bishkek; Uighurs have been blamed for a bombing which killed 20 at a shrine in Bangkok popular with Chinese tourists.
There are worrying links, as the Chinese authorities are keen to point out, between Uighur separatism and global jihad, especially in the Uighur diaspora, which is based in Turkey. Chinese and Syrian officials say 1,500 Uighurs have fought with Islamic State (IS) or Jabhat al-Nusra (part of al-Qaeda) in Syria. A group called the Turkestan Islamic Party, which demands independence for Xinjiang, is banned under anti-terrorist laws in America and Europe. In 2016 a defector from IS provided a list of foreign recruits; 114 came from Xinjiang.
In the grid
But the system of repression in the province goes far beyond anything that would be justified by such proclivities and affiliations. In Hotan there is a new police station every 300 metres or so. They are called “convenience police stations”, as if they were shops—and in fact they do offer some consumer services, such as bottled water and phone recharging. The windowless stations, gunmetal grey, with forbidding grilles on their doors, are part of a “grid-management system” like that which Mr Chen pioneered when he was party boss in Tibet from 2011 to 2016. The authorities divide each city into squares, with about 500 people. Every square has a police station that keeps tabs on the inhabitants. So, in rural areas, does every village.
At a large checkpoint on the edge of Hotan a policeman orders everyone off a bus. The passengers (all Uighur) take turns in a booth. Their identity cards are scanned, photographs and fingerprints of them are taken, newly installed iris-recognition technology peers into their eyes. Women must take off their headscarves. Three young Uighurs are told to turn on their smartphones and punch in the passwords. They give the phones to a policeman who puts the devices into a cradle that downloads their contents for later analysis. One woman shouts at a policeman that he is Uighur, why is he looking at her phone?
There can be four or five checkpoints every kilometre. Uighurs go through them many times a day.
Shops and restaurants in Hotan have panic buttons with which to summon the police. The response time is one minute. Apparently because of the Kunming knife attack, knives and scissors are as hard to buy as a gun in Japan. In butchers and restaurants all over Xinjiang you will see kitchen knives chained to the wall, lest they be snatched up and used as weapons. In Aksu QR codes containing the owner’s identity-card information have to be engraved on every blade.
Remarkably, all shops and restaurants in Hotan must have a part-time policeman on duty. Thousands of shop assistants and waiters have been enrolled in the police to this end. Each is issued with a helmet, flak jacket and three-foot baton. They train in the afternoon. In the textile market these police officers sit in every booth and stall, selling things; their helmets and flak jackets, which are uncomfortable, are often doffed. A squad of full-time police walks through the market making sure security cameras are working and ordering shop assistants to put their helmets back on. Asked why they wear them, the assistants reply tersely “security”.
At the city’s railway station, travellers go through three rounds of bag checks before buying a ticket. On board, police walk up and down ordering Uighurs to open their luggage again. As the train pulls into Kashgar, it passes metal goods wagons. A toddler points at them shouting excitedly “Armoured car! Armoured car!” Paramilitary vehicles are more familiar to him than rolling stock.
Uniformed shop assistants, knife controls and “convenience police stations” are only the most visible elements of the police state. The province has an equally extensive if less visible regime that uses yet more manpower and a great deal of technology to create total surveillance.
Improving lives, winning hearts
Under a system called fanghuiju, teams of half a dozen—composed of policemen or local officials and always including one Uighur speaker, which almost always means a Uighur—go from house to house compiling dossiers of personal information. Fanghuiju is short for “researching people’s conditions, improving people’s lives, winning people’s hearts”. But the party refers to the work as “eradicating tumours”. The teams—over 10,000 in rural areas in 2017—report on “extremist” behaviour such as not drinking alcohol, fasting during Ramadan and sporting long beards. They report back on the presence of “undesirable” items, such as Korans, or attitudes—such as an “ideological situation” that is not in wholehearted support of the party.
Since the spring of 2017, the information has been used to rank citizens’ “trustworthiness” using various criteria. People are deemed trustworthy, average or untrustworthy depending on how they fit into the following categories: 15 to 55 years old (ie, of military age); Uighur (the catalogue is explicitly racist: people are suspected merely on account of their ethnicity); unemployed; have religious knowledge; pray five times a day (freedom of worship is guaranteed by China’s constitution); have a passport; have visited one of 26 countries; have ever overstayed a visa; have family members in a foreign country (there are at least 10,000 Uighurs in Turkey); and home school their children. Being labelled “untrustworthy” can lead to a camp.
To complete the panorama of human surveillance, the government has a programme called “becoming kin” in which local families (mostly Uighur) “adopt” officials (mostly Han). The official visits his or her adoptive family regularly, lives with it for short periods, gives the children presents and teaches the household Mandarin. He also verifies information collected by fanghuiju teams. The programme appears to be immense. According to an official report in 2018, 1.1m officials have been paired with 1.6m families. That means roughly half of Uighur households have had a Han-Chinese spy/indoctrinator assigned to them.
Such efforts map the province’s ideological territory family by family; technology maps the population’s activities street by street and phone by phone. In Hotan and Kashgar there are poles bearing perhaps eight or ten video cameras at intervals of 100-200 metres along every street; a far finer-grained surveillance net than in most Chinese cities. As well as watching pedestrians the cameras can read car number plates and correlate them with the face of the person driving. Only registered owners may drive cars; anyone else will be arrested, according to a public security official who accompanied this correspondent in Hotan. The cameras are equipped to work at night as well as by day.
Because the government sees what it calls “web cleansing” as necessary to prevent access to terrorist information, everyone in Xinjiang is supposed to have a spywear app on their mobile phone. Failing to install the app, which can identify people called, track online activity and record social-media use, is an offence. “Wi-Fi sniffers” in public places keep an eye, or nose, on all networked devices in range.
Next, the records associated with identity cards can contain biometric data including fingerprints, blood type and DNA information as well as the subject’s detention record and “reliability status”. The government collects a lot of this biometric material by stealth, under the guise of a public-health programme called “Physicals for All”, which requires people to give blood samples. Local officials “demanded [we] participate in the physicals,” one resident of Kashgar told Human Rights Watch, an NGO. “Not participating would have been seen as a problem…”
A system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), first revealed by Human Rights Watch, uses machine-learning systems, information from cameras, smartphones, financial and family-planning records and even unusual electricity use to generate lists of suspects for detention. One official WeChat report said that verifying IJOP’s lists was one of the main responsibilities of the local security committee. Even without high-tech surveillance, Xinjiang’s police state is formidable. With it, it becomes terrifying.
In theory, the security system in Xinjiang applies to everyone equally. In practice it is as race-based as apartheid in South Africa was. The security apparatus is deployed in greatest force in the south-west, where around 80% of Uighurs live (see map). In a city like Shihezi, which is 95% Han, there are far fewer street checkpoints, if any, and a normal level of policing. Where there are checkpoints, Han Chinese are routinely waved through. Uighurs are always stopped.
The minarets torn down
Islam is a special target. In Hotan, the neighbourhood mosques have been closed, leaving a handful of large places of worship. Worshippers must register with the police before attending. At the entrance to the largest mosque in Kashgar, the Idh Kha—a famous place of pilgrimage—two policemen sit underneath a banner saying “Love the party, love the country”. Inside, a member of the mosque’s staff holds classes for local traders on how to be a good communist. In Urumqi the remaining mosques have had their minarets knocked down and their Islamic crescents torn off.
Some 29 Islamic names may no longer be given to children. In schools, Uighur-language instruction is vanishing—another of the trends which have markedly accelerated under Mr Chen. Dancing after prayers and specific Uighur wedding ceremonies and funerary rites are prohibited.
Unlike those of South Africa, the two main racial groups are well matched in size. According to the 2010 census, Uighurs account for 46% of the province’s population and Han Chinese 40% (the rest are smaller minorities such as Kazakhs and Kirgiz). But they live apart and see the land in distinct ways. Uighurs regard Xinjiang as theirs because they have lived in it for thousands of years. The Han Chinese regard it as theirs because they have built a modern economy in its deserts and mountains. They talk of bringing “modern culture” and “modern lifestyle” to the locals—by which they mean the culture and lifestyle of modern Han China.
So how have the Han and Uighur reacted to the imposition of a police state? Yang Jiehun and Xiao Junduo are Han Chinese veterans of the trade in Hotan jade (which the Chinese hold to be the best in the world, notably in its very pale “mutton-fat” form). Asked about security, they give big smiles, a thumbs-up and say the past year’s crackdown has been “really well received”. “In terms of public security, Urumqi is the safest it has ever been,” says Mr Xiao, whose family came to the province in the 1950s, when the People’s Liberation Army and state-owned enterprises were reinforcing the border with the Soviet Union. “The Uighurs are being helped out of poverty,” he avers. “They understand and support the policy.”
Not all Han Chinese in Xinjiang are quite as enthusiastic. Tens of thousands came to the province fairly recently, mostly in the 1990s, to seek their fortunes as independent traders and business people, rather than being transferred there by state-owned companies or the army. They approve of better security but dislike the damage being done to the economy—for example, the way movement controls make it harder to employ Uighurs. So far, this ambivalence is not seriously weakening the support among the Han and, for the government in Beijing, that is all that matters. It sees Xinjiang mainly as a frontier. The Han are the principal guarantors of border security. If they are happy, so is the government.
The Uighur reaction is harder to judge; open criticism or talking to outsiders can land you in jail. The crackdown has been effective inasmuch as there have been no (known) Uighur protests or attacks since early 2017. It seems likely that many people are bowing before the storm. As Sultan, a student in Kashgar, says with a shrug: “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
But there are reasons for thinking resentment is building up below the surface. According to anthropological work by Mr Byler and Joanne Smith Finley of Newcastle University in Britain, a religious revival had been under way before the imposition of today’s harsh control. Mosques were becoming more crowded, religious schools attracting more pupils. Now the schools and mosques are largely empty, even for Friday prayers. It is hard to believe that religious feeling has vanished. More likely a fair bit has gone underground.
And the position of Uighurs who co-operate with the Han authorities is becoming untenable. The provincial government needs the Uighur elite because its members have good relations with both sides. The expansion of the police state has added to the number of Uighurs it needs to co-opt. According to Mr Zenz and James Leibold of La Trobe University in Melbourne, 90% of the security jobs advertised in 2017 were “third tier” jobs for low-level police assistants: cheap, informal contracts which mainly go to Uighurs (see chart). But at the same time as needing more Uighurs, the authorities have made it clear that they do not trust them. Part of the repression has been aimed at “two-faced officials” who (the party says) are publicly supporting the security system while secretly helping victims. Simultaneously recruiting more Uighurs and distrusting them more creates an ever larger pool that might one day turn against the system from within.
A Han businessman who travels frequently between Urumqi and Kashgar says he used to feel welcome in the south. “Now it has all changed. They are not afraid. But they are resentful. They look at me as if they are wondering what I am doing in their country.” One of the few detainees released from the camps, Omurbek Eli, told RFA that the authorities “are planting the seeds of hatred and turning [detainees] into enemies. This is not just my view—the majority of people in the camp feel the same way.”
Hasan’s warning
China’s Communist rulers believe their police state limits separatism and reduces violence. But by separating the Uighur and Han further, and by imposing huge costs on one side that the other side, for the most part, blithely ignores, they are ratcheting up tension. The result is that both groups are drifting towards violence.
Before he disappeared, Hasan, the self-styled Sufi wanderer, expressed Xinjiang’s plight. “To be Uighur is hard,” he wrote on WeChat in 2015. “I don’t even know what I am accused of, but I must accept their judgment. I have no choice. Where there is no freedom, there is tension. Where there is tension there are incidents. Where there are incidents there are police. Where there are police there is no freedom.”
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2...-like-no-other
Re: Muslim children forced to drop 'religious' names in western China
Salaam
Another update.
Islamic Leaders Have Nothing to Say About China’s Internment Camps for Muslims
Hundreds of thousands of Uighur have been detained without trial in China's western region of Xinjiang.
https://www.islamicboard.com/images/...00crop00-1.jpg
Internment camps with up to a million prisoners. Empty neighborhoods. Students, musicians, athletes, and peaceful academics jailed. A massive high-tech surveillance state that monitors and judges every movement. The future of more than 10 million Uighurs, the members of China’s Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, is looking increasingly grim.
As the Chinese authorities continue a brutal crackdown in Xinjiang, the northwest region of China that’s home to the Uighur, Islam has been one of the main targets. Major mosques in the major cities of Kashgar and Urumqi now stand empty. Prisoners in the camps are told to renounce God and embrace the Chinese Communist Party. Prayers, religious education, and the Ramadan fast are increasingly restricted or banned. Even in the rest of China, Arabic text is being stripped from public buildings, and Islamophobia is being tacitly encouraged by party authorities.
But amid this state-backed campaign against their religious brethren, Muslim leaders and communities around the world stand silent. While the fate of the Palestinians stirs rage and resistance throughout the Islamic world, and millions stood up to condemn the persecution of the Rohingya, there’s been hardly a sound on behalf of the Uighur. No Muslim nation’s head of state has made a public statement in support of the Uighurs this decade. Politicians and many religious leaders who claim to speak for the faith are silent in the face of China’s political and economic power.
“One of our primary barriers has been a definite lack of attention from Muslim-majority states,” said Peter Irwin, a project manager at the World Uyghur Congress. This isn’t out of ignorance. “It is very well documented,” said Omer Kanat, the director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project. “The Muslim-majority countries governments know what’s happening in East Turkestan,” he said, using the Uighur term for the region.
Many Muslim governments have strengthened their relationship with China or even gone out of their way to support China’s persecution. Last summer, Egypt deported several ethnic Uighurs back to China, where they faced near-certain jail time and, potentially, death, to little protest. This followed similar moves by Malaysia and Pakistan in 2011.
This is in stark contrast to how these countries react to news of prejudice against Muslims by the West or, especially, Israel. Events in Gaza have sparked protests across the Islamic world, not only in the Middle East but also in more distant Bangladesh and Indonesia. If Egypt or Malaysia had deported Palestinians to Israeli prisons, the uproar would likely have been ferocious. But the brutal, and expressly anti-religious, persecution of Uighurs prompts no response, even as the campaign spreads to the Uighur diaspora worldwide.
Part of the answer is that money talks. China has become a key trade partner of every Muslim-majority nation. Many are members of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or are participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In South Asia, this means infrastructure investment. In Southeast Asia, China is a key market for commodities such as palm oil and coal. The Middle East benefits due to China’s position as the world’s top importer of oil and its rapidly increasing use of natural gas.
“Many states in the Middle East are becoming more economically dependent on China,” said Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, a Chinese-Middle East relations expert at the University of Technology Sydney. “China’s geoeconomic strategy has resulted in political influence.”
“I don’t think there is a direct fear of retribution or fear of pressure,” said Dawn Murphy, a China-Middle East relations expert at Princeton University. “I do think that the elite of these various countries are weighing their interests, and they are making a decision that continuing to have positive relations with China is more important than bringing up these human rights issues.”
Xinjiang’s immediate neighbors, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kazakhstan, face a particularly difficult situation. The ongoing persecution has caught up some of their own citizens, or their families. But with both close economic and geopolitical ties to China, these countries are highly reluctant to speak up. Pakistan sees China as a vital balancer against India, and their relationship, sometimes referred to as the “iron brotherhood,” goes back decades.
But there are subtler reasons the Uighur are ignored. They are on the edge of the Muslim world, in contrast to the Palestinian cause, which is directly connected to the fate of one of Islam’s holiest cities, Jerusalem. China has little place in the cultural imagination of Islam, in contrast with Muslims’ fraught relationship with the idea of a Jewish state. Even as China’s presence in the Middle East grows, it lacks the looming presence of the United States or Israel.
China’s success at cutting off access to Xinjiang is another reason. A regular dose of videos depicting Palestinian suffering hits YouTube every day. Interviews with tearful Rohingya stream on Al Jazeera and other global media outlets. Palestinian representatives and advocates speak and write in the media. But few images are emerging from Xinjiang due to restrictions on press access and the massive state censorship apparatus. That means the world sees little more than blurry satellite footage of the internment camps. Even Uighurs who have escaped are often only able to talk anonymously, not least because Chinese intelligence regularly threatens persecution of their families back home if they speak up.
It’s also much harder to stir up feelings about a new cause rather than an old, established one. For leaders who care more about their own popularity than human rights, it’s an easy call. “People tend to pay more attention to this kind of issue,” said Ahmad Farouk Musa, the director of the Malaysian nongovernmental organization Islamic Renaissance Front. “You gain popularity if you show you are anti-Zionism and if you are fighting for the Palestinians, as compared to the Rohingya or Uighurs.”
There are two places, however, where there may be hope for leadership. One is Southeast Asia, where Indonesia and Malaysia are two of the Islamic world’s few democracies. Both have relatively a free press, have an active civil society, and, importantly, are geographically close to China, giving the giant country more of a presence in the local public consciousness. Anti-Chinese feeling is strong in both nations, especially Indonesia.
Malaysia bears watching due to its recent historic election. China was a key campaign issue, due to its connection to the massive, multibillion-dollar 1MDB scandal. The new government is taking a strong position on China, with the new finance minister, Lim Guan Eng, pledging to review all of China’s trade deals with the country and suspending several existing projects.
“The Chinese had been very influential in giving loans to [former Prime Minister] Najib [Razak] to stay in power, so they felt compelled to accept whatever the Chinese wanted them to do,” Musa said. “I hope that the new government has shifted their policy and will become more sensitive towards this issue and about human rights.”
The first test of this will happen soon, as the Chinese government is demanding the deportation of 11 Uighur asylum-seekers from Malaysia. The new government, led by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, may not be as willing to bend to China’s demands as the previous one.
The other place to watch is Turkey, which has a strong cultural connection to the Turkic-speaking Uighurs and is home to the largest Uighur exile community. In 2009, when riots broke out in Urumqi, only Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke out. Turkey has also seen the only widespread protests against China’s treatment of Uighurs, most recently in 2015.
“Turkey is the only major country whose leadership as well as the public is widely aware of the Uighur persecution in East Turkestan,” said Alip Erkin , a Uighur activist currently living aboard.
But Turkey’s growing authoritarianism has caused it to look toward China as a possible ally against the West. Since Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu visited China last year and said his country would eliminate “anti-China media reports,” there has been less attention given to the Uighur cause, including on the streets. Still, many Uighurs hold out hope.
“Many Uighurs think Turkey can be the ultimate defender of the Uighur cause when the time is right,” Erkin said.
While the signs of hope are there for the Uighur cause, they are small and localized. China’s profile is growing, and more Muslim-majority nations are becoming dependent on its economic power—earlier this month, $23 billion in loans was promised to Arab states. The chances of a unified Muslim response to the Uighur human rights crisis are getting slimmer and slimmer.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/islamic-leaders-have-nothing-to-say-about-chinas-internment-camps-for-muslims/
