Stanford Politics

In Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, the government has detained up to million Uighur Muslims (nearly 10 percent of the total Uighur population) in government-operated internment camps. Branded officially as “re-education centers,” the camps are part of a larger crackdown by the Beijing leadership to tighten control over the historically volatile region. Within concrete walls patrolled by armed guards, prisoners are forced to renounce Islam, learn Chinese, and pledge loyalty to the Communist party. Depending on the “crime,” internees receive sentences ranging from months to 15 years—despite never being formally charged with crime—where they spend each day in classrooms reciting pro-regime propaganda. Survivors also report being forced to consume pork and alcohol, which is forbidden in the Sunni sect that most Uighurs practice. International experts consider the program serious human rights violation under the pretext of combating terrorism, comparable to a “cultural cleansing.” According to a report by Human Rights Watch, “Chinese law defines terrorism and extremism in an overbroad and vague manner and does not require that action be taken in furtherance of a crime to prompt prosecution, deprivation of liberty, or other restrictions.” The report also deemed the crisis “of a scope and scale not seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.” To the outside world, it may seem like the Muslim faith is being ruthlessly crushed and supplanted by the nationalist, authoritarian ideology that modern China has embraced. Yet, a thousand miles from Urumqi, in the heartland of China, another Muslim group, the Hui, are free to practice their faith without the threat of persecution.

A World of Difference

In Xinjiang, one can be arrested for praying in public, growing a beard, viewing foreign websites, or quitting smoking too suddenly. These rules were published in an official 2014 statement titled, “75 signs of religious extremism,” and have lead to thousands of arrests. In 2017, criminal arrests in Xinjiang accounted for 21% of Chinese arrests, despite the Xinjiang population representing only 1.5% of the national population, a three-fold increase in the past five years.

Children in Xinjiang are forbidden from learning religious teachings and attending religious services. The building of mosques and the training of clergy are also heavily restricted by local officials. In recent years, the entire Xinjiang region has been effectively transformed into a surveillance state—one of the most effective in the world. Police stations lie on every block of every major city and village, and are each responsible for monitoring about 500 people. There are 500 police per 10k inhabitants (New York City has 423). The roads are lined with checkpoints where Uighurs are routinely stopped and searched. At these checkpoints, passersby present valid identity card while photographs are taken, fingerprints recorded, and eyes scanned using iris-recognition software. Teams of half a dozen policemen go house and house, compiling dossiers of personal information on residents under a system called Fanghuiju. Neighbors are encouraged to report and turn in anyone guilty of suspicious activity. Anyone living in Xinjiang must install a spyware app on their phone that tracks online activity and social media. All data collected is then consolidated and sent into a computer system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, which uses machine learning to evaluate an individual’s trustworthiness. Under China’s rising social credit system, merely being Uighur is enough to lower one’s score.

In contrast, the restrictions are far laxer for the Hui. In the 1980s, China passed series of reforms that restored Islamic buildings, permitted religious schools and texts, and opened religious worship—reforms that have largely excluded Xinjiang. These reforms have led to the reconstruction of some 40,000 mosques, mainly funded and used by Hui worshippers. Local governments also support the establishment of Muslim faith schools, known as “Sino-Arab” schools. With approval from the government, these private schools are run by Hui imams and cater to poor Hui who cannot afford regular schooling. Hui are also able to participate in the Hajj, the religious pilgrimage to Mecca, while many Uighurs are banned altogether from making the trip. In the Chinese Islamic Association, the national committee that oversees all religious affairs in China, the Hui are overrepresented when compared to the Uighurs. Through the association, Hui representatives conduct diplomacy with international Islamic bodies like the Muslim World League, and receive foreign aid from Arab states for religious projects.

These extreme disparities in treatment are not born out of chance. Although the Hui and Uighurs share a religion, they differ in almost every other aspect: ethnic origins, cultural practices, and historical perception by the Han majority. While China’s eight million Uighurs live almost exclusively in southern Xinjiang, the nine million Hui are scattered across central China. Significant Hui populations can be found in the Ningxia, Gansu, and Qinghai provinces, which lie between Xinjiang to the west and Inner Mongolia to the north. Smaller communities are also extant in major cities like Beijing and Xi’an. Together, the Uighur and Hui peoples form ninety percent of China’s Muslim population.

Unlike the Uighurs, whose historical relations with China have been consistently that of conquest and subjugation, the Hui have had a much more complex relationship with China—laden with conflict, yet also cooperation and coexistence. As a result, the Hui enjoy the special status of an ideal Muslim minority (in the eyes of the CCP), along with freedoms that seem unthinkable to a Uighur.

A Tale of Two Peoples

One of the pioneers of the Age of Exploration was Zheng He, the famous Ming admiral who sailed down the coast of Africa during the early 15th century. He also happened to be a Hui, as were many of the sailors employed on his ships. During one voyage, he traveled to Mecca to perform the sacred pilgrimage. Today, his legacy is celebrated not only in China as a national hero, but also in the southeast Asian states influenced by his arrival (he is credited with the introduction of Islam to Indonesia).

Like Zheng, Hui figures have played important roles throughout Chinese history. Since the introduction of Islam in the 7th century, the Hui have fulfilled historical roles as translators, merchants, and administrators, forming a sort of cultural bridge to China’s Muslim neighbors along the Silk Road. It is the heritage of generations of intermixing among Han, Persian, Arab, and Central Asian peoples to which Hui lay claim. Apart from their distinctive, white headdress, modern Hui are physically indistinguishable from the Han, and most Hui are fluent in Mandarin.

The Hui have fought in virtually every Chinese military conflict in recent history, sometimes alongside the Han, sometimes against, and sometimes even against other Muslims and Hui. Examples range from a Hui general who quashed Muslim rebellions against the Ming dynasty, to Hui warlords who defended China during the Sino-Japanese war. Han-Hui relations are complicated and usually dependent on the administration in power. For the Communist party, relations fell to the nadir during the Shadian Incident: in 1975, in response to Hui protests of the closing of a local mosque, 10,000 soldiers—equipped with assault rifles, artillery, and fighter jets—were deployed to the town of Shadian,. In the aftermath of the massacre, 1,600 villagers lay dead and 4,000 homes destroyed. The incident was an ugly retread of the senseless ethnic killings that were all-too-familiar in dynastic times. Yet, rather than downplay and deny, as the CCP have done to many such atrocities, the government apologized and issued reparations to families after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Today, Shadian’s Grand Mosque, built with the help of such funds, incorporating both Arabic and Chinese architecture, stands as a testament to the Hui’s religious revival.

But Uighurs have no shared heroes like Zheng He to point to. Their history began as a distinct Turkic people who originated from the Tiele tribes of Central Asia. Around 800AD, a Uighur Khanate emerged as a confederation among tribes, spanning all of modern-day Mongolia. After its collapse in the 9th century, many Uighurs moved south and settled in the Tarim Basin. The region would be under Mongol rule until the 18th century, when a series of Qing invasions annexed the former Mongol territories, incorporating the Basin into the newly created state of Xinjiang. The Qing employed an active campaign of sinicization to eradicate and replace local cultures, incurring massive Han migration to Xinjiang and changing the ethnic composition of the region forever. To this day, the CCP employs a similar form of state-sponsored migration, encouraging millions of Chinese migrant workers to settle in the richer north of Xinjiang, further polarizing the ethnic composition of the region.

Despite more than millennia of foreign rule, Uighur independence has found short-lived success on occasion. In the 1860s, Uighur warlord seized control of the city of Kashgar and declared a jihad against the oppressors before being defeated by Qing forces a decade later. In the early 20th century, Uighur separatists took advantage of the ongoing Chinese civil war to establish successive Uighur republics under the new geopolitical identity of “East Turkestan,” a term intended to distance ties with China. These states were backed by the Soviet Union to undermine Chinese territorial security following the Sino-Soviet split, but were largely unrecognized by the international community as sovereign. Following the communist victory in 1949 and Chinese reunification, the last hopes of Uighur independence were snuffed out as the PRC troops marched into Xinjiang unopposed and established the autonomous region under Chinese rule.

Today, Uighur independence movements are fractionalized and disorganized. Some, like the World Uighur Congress, support the creation of a democratic Uighur state through nonviolent resistance. Others prefer more extreme methods, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which is designated by the US and EU as a terrorist organization with ties to Al-Qaeda. According to the Chinese government, the group is responsible for carrying out numerous attacks in recent years. In 2014, masked individuals attacked commuters in train station in Kunming, killing 29 and wounding hundreds. State-owned media blamed the attack on Uighur separatists, fueling anti-Uighur sentiments and reinforcing Beijing’s hardline stance towards Xinjiang.

Islam with Chinese Characteristics

With China adopting a more aggressive foreign policy to challenge the West and regional rivals, managing domestic security and public opinion have become priorities in the political agenda. The brutal crackdown in Xinjiang is a way to remind the inhabitants of Xinjiang who is really in charge. It is also a clear affirmation to the general populace of the government’s ability to maintain order in a world increasingly beset by extremist ideologies. Given the strategic importance of Xinjiang—it contains substantial mineral and oil deposits and is a key part of the One Belt One Road Initiative—the timing makes all the more sense.

While Uighur prisoners in internment camps are made to renounce Islam, it is not religion by which China is threatened. Rather, the Uighurs, and the separatist fighters that they are synonymous with in Chinese state media, represent an existential and territorial threat to Chinese legitimacy. Xinjiang is but one piece on China’s geopolitical chessboard, one that includes Tibet, US military presence in Japan and Taiwan, and competing claims to the South China Sea. Yet, the history of Xinjiang demonstrated a key realization for China: any geographic insecurity can be exploited by foreign powers to undermine and weaken Chinese authority. Just as the Soviet Union helped sow the seeds of Uighur resistance in the 1960s, China considers local instability in Tibet part of a larger political rivalry with India, who borders Tibet and hosts the Dalai Lama in exile. The ongoing crises in Xinjiang and Tibet reflect China’s belief that policies that quash resistance and guarantee total internal security are necessary to strengthen China’s position in the modern world.

Thus, China’s crackdown in Xinjiang is fundamentally political in nature. The treatment of the Hui and Uighurs highlights a key difference in how China perceives them. To the CCP, the Hui are Chinese who happen to be Muslim. The Uighurs, on the other hand, are Muslims who happen to live in China.

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Wilson Liang, a freshman studying economics, is a staff writer for Stanford Politics.