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China’s Crackdown on Islam Brings Back Memories of 1975 Massacre

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SHADIAN, China—“Assalamu alaikum,” Ma Zhijun greeted me in Arabic, extending me peace and a broad toothy smile. We were strangers eyeing the same beef skewers in front of Shadian’s Grand Mosque, the largest in southwestern China, at the end of Ramadan in 2019. Food stalls lined Moslem Avenue; Eid al-Fitr had finally arrived, and Muslims in the Chinese town were eager to make up for a month of daytime fasting.

“Are you one of our Muslims?” he asked when I returned his greeting, perhaps puzzled by my proper beard but poor Arabic. “No,” I replied, prompting Ma’s invitation to the shade of palm trees that lined the mosque plaza, a refuge from the baking June sun. There, for much of the afternoon, he shared his faith with me until the call to prayer beckoned him away.

I welcomed the conversation. An imam in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, had described Ramadan for me in cursory English: “no eating, no drinking, and no sexing.” But I knew there were more restrictions in Shadian than merely fasting. Muslims in Shadian, a small town that’s now a suburb of Gejiu city in Yunnan, are in the eye of an increasingly paranoid and Islamophobic state—especially because of the city’s history as a flash point between Communist Party power and Islamic faith.

China’s religious policies are tightening, including new regulations enacted in 2018 and 2020, and Muslim communities across China are feeling the pressure. Uyghur Muslims, numbering about 12 million, have faced increasingly repressive policies in Xinjiang since ethnic conflict in 2009; an estimated 1 million have been placed in detention camps for what the state calls “reeducation” and “counterextremism training.” Hui Muslims are almost as numerous but rarely in the headlines due to better integration into Han-majority China. But in recent years, attitudes toward Hui have shifted, and some in the community fear the impact. I went to Shadian to find out how residents were experiencing the changes and where China’s religious policy was going.

The Grand Mosque is aptly named. Its crescent-topped green dome and soaring minarets were fashioned after the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, built and used by Muhammad himself and now where he is entombed. It towers over Shadian—grandiose for a town of fewer than 20,000 people—but that was the plan. In the early 2000s, local officials decided to turn Shadian into a four-star Islamic tourism destination, and a new mosque was central to their vision. Local Muslims, flush with cash from private mining and China’s booming economy, donated generously while the government provided the land and signed off on the Middle Eastern design. Party officials, officially atheist themselves, even spearheaded an alcohol ban to make Shadian more authentically Muslim. They weren’t the only ones: Ningxia, another Hui-majority region, transformed itself into a center of the halal meat trade. China was hungry for foreign investment, and that included Middle Eastern money—even when it was used to spread religion.


In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork.

That was an ironic vision, given the history of the town. Yunnan had been the heart of the Panthay Rebellion, a Muslim revolt in the 1850s that established an effectively independent sultanate in southeastern China for nearly 20 years. Other memories were closer and bloodier. The Shadian incident, as it was euphemistically termed, still lingered.

In 1968, China was at the height of the campaign to “smash the Four Olds.” The campaign to destroy pre-Communist elements of Chinese culture—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—played out with fanatical zeal in different ways across China, leaving smashed buildings and burnt books behind it.

In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork. One mosque in Shadian was converted into a propaganda center where the Communist work teams lived, raised, and slaughtered pigs and allegedly threw bones into the well used for ritual ablutions before prayer. Hui formed militias and sent appeals to the provincial and central governments for religious freedoms supposedly afforded to citizens under the 1954 constitution of the People’s Republic of China. But the petitions went unheeded—and party officials saw resistance as insurrection.



Finally, in July 1975, the People’s Liberation Army was ordered to suppress the Hui resistance in Shadian. Troops surrounded the town before dawn on July 29 and for the next seven days bombed it with heavy artillery. “Shadian looked like a heap of ruins,” wrote Ma Ping, the head of the Institute for Hui and Islamic Studies at the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences. “You could see pieces of arms and legs shredded. The air reeked with the nauseating stench of rotting corpses.” Some estimates suggest 1,500 people were killed, almost one-fourth of Shadian’s population at the time.

In 1979, after Mao Zedong had died and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had subsided, the liberal-minded national leader Hu Yaobang, himself purged twice in the past, wrote a letter absolving Shadian Hui of blame and issuing reparations. The same army that had reduced Shadian to rubble was ordered to return and rebuild it. By the 2000s, officials were reimagining a town once famous for religious clashes as a site of peaceful tourism.

But Shadian’s ambitions for tourism vanished in March 2014. Eight Uyghurs from Xinjiang armed themselves with knives, entered the Kunming Railway Station, and began slashing passengers indiscriminately. Thirty-one people were killed and more than 140 injured before four of the attackers were shot and one apprehended. The other three fled to Shadian, where they were arrested two days later.

Prior to this event, Hui and Uyghur Muslims were distinct in the minds of China’s Han majority. Many regarded Hui as the model Muslim minority. “Hui look Han, talk like Han, and have assimilated better into a Han-centric society,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uyghur technopolitics. “But Uyghurs look foreign, have their own language, and have a territorial homeland.” According to Byler, the double threat of separatism and Islamist terrorism is why the Chinese Communist Party’s policy toward Uyghurs in Xinjiang has been so brutal.

Two imams outside the Grand Mosque in Shadian, China.

Shortly before sunrise, two imams pose for a photo after leading congregational prayers at Shadian’s Grand Mosque on June 5, 2019, the day after Eid al-Fitr. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
But after the Kunming attack, public sentiment toward Hui Muslims hardened, and Shadian was labeled a center for “ethnoreligious extremism.” Netizens complained about the fact that national food delivery apps provided halal options and about the alcohol bans in Shadian and some other predominantly Muslim areas. “Chinese people have the unalienable right to drink alcohol,” wrote one enraged netizen in the aftermath of the attack. Meantime, the 2015 Paris attacks and Islamic State violence in Syria and Iraq reinforced perceptions of the threat of Islam, while Islamophobic narratives generated by Western far-right activists were fed back into China through WeChat groups, unbothered by otherwise vigilant censors.

“That is not our Islam!” Ma Xiaoxiao told me. She had large dark eyes and a round face framed by a fashionable bob cut. A mutual friend had introduced me to her husband, Wang Gang, who was driving their Range Rover with the air conditioning blasting. “We are not…” she paused, searching for the English word, “…kongbu fenzi!”

“Terrorists,” I filled in.

“Right! We are not terrorists. Those people use the Quran and religion to defend their bad actions.”

As a person of faith, I sympathized: “Many religious people don’t let Scriptures affect what they want to believe.”

Wang parked in an alley, and Ma put on a hijab, covering her hair and neck, before we strolled through a street market. “Everyone here still wears one,” she said, almost apologetically. Ma and Wang live in eastern China, where few wear traditional Muslim dress. Having met attending a foreign university, they admitted their thinking was different than many Hui in Shadian. In fact, Wang wasn’t Muslim until he fell in love with Ma and converted.

While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization.

“Here the older generation is still closed-minded,” she continued. “Our generation wants to go out to understand and share with the world. I believe mine, and you can believe yours,” she told me. “That’s what I love about our mosque here. It has no walls. It’s open to everyone—inclusive—like our Islam.”


But as we drove past the Grand Mosque, a Chinese flag flew front and center flanked by a black surveillance van labeled “Police.” While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping did not mince his words to the 19th Party Congress: The Communist Party will “insist on the Sinicization of Chinese religions and provide active guidance for religion and socialism to coexist.”

Then in 2018, party leadership implemented revised regulations on religious affairs followed by five-year plans to Sinicize Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—those religions permitted in China that are most suspect of foreign influence. As these sweeping regulations have come into effect, well-known Protestant house churches in Beijing and Chengdu have been closed, the Communist Party has exerted authority to appoint Catholic bishops, and efforts to retranslate and annotate the Bible are underway to establish a “correct understanding” of the text.

Muslim communities have seen mosques demolished or domes and crescents removed from them. Religious education has been banned, and unauthorized religious activities are prohibited. The Religious Affairs Bureau in one county has ordered mosques to play the Chinese national anthem instead of adhan, the call to prayer, and last spring I visited three house mosques that had been raided and chained shut by authorities, as reported by Foreign Policy.

Policies are always localized, so enforcement varies across China. In Shadian, sometimes the government’s approach appears softer, while other times it wants to make an example of Shadian to China’s Muslim communities. “Other Hui are watching us,” a groundskeeper at a mosque told me. “The government knows Shadian is a flash point. That’s because of our history.”

In 1979, a memorial was also erected at the top of Phoenix Tail Mountain overlooking the town. I walked up a narrow concrete road, winding past hundreds of unmarked burial mounds to the monument. Victims’ names are carved into the base: Ma Jinguo, Ma Jiacai, Ma Fuguang, all sharing a surname as common as “Smith” among Chinese Muslims. A stone pillar reaches 30 feet into the sky, topped with a crescent moon—like those now being forcibly removed across China. The pillar reads, “Memorial to the Shadian Incident Martyrs.”

Men used to cram shoulder to shoulder on their prayer rugs around the monument every Eid al-Fitr, recalled Li Minghong, a childhood friend of Ma Xiaoxiao. “I grew up saying prayers there,” she told me, “but most young people don’t know a lot about it. We were educated to love this country and believe the government.” In 2008, prayers were moved to the newly built Grand Mosque. “I thought it was a space issue,” Li said, “but later I learned that the government did not want people to gather at the memorial.” That Eid al-Fitr, I was alone at the monument.

Worshippers gather at a mosque in Shadian, China.

Men gather at a neighborhood mosque in Shadian for evening prayers the day after Eid al-Fitr on June 5, 2019. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
Restrictions have tightened in Shadian since my visit. Leading up to National Day in October 2019, hijabs were prohibited in state institutions like schools and universities, hospitals, and government buildings. All kindergartens, most of which had provided religious education, have closed, with the exception of one government-operated school. Arabic script is now prohibited.

“There’s no policy on paper, but there’s pressure,” said Ruslan Yusupov of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yusupov did two years of fieldwork in Shadian and has felt the tightening environment. “It travels in the atmosphere. Everyone talks about it. You inhale it. The government will let you know what it wants you to know.”


Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage.

These are trends across China, not just in Shadian. Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage. Some vendors have simply changed their halal signs from the traditional green logo to red as a way around the ban. Street signs in Ningxia that once included Arabic to help overseas Muslims do business there have been replaced. Even a river named after one of Muhammad’s wives has been renamed to sound more Chinese.

“It’s so counterproductive,” one Western academic told me on condition of anonymity due to their active research in China. “The government and businesses have spent millions developing the halal industry and attracting overseas investment and tourism. Now all for nothing.” More foreboding is that the authorities are now forcing academics to limit research and remove academic articles on Hui issues—“even innocuous topics such as culture, dress, and food,” the scholar added, flabbergasted.

In February 2020, additional regulations went into effect to reinforce the revised religious regulations from 2018. The new Administrative Measures for Religious Groups state that “religious organizations must support the leadership of the Communist Party of China,” or CCP. They must also “adhere to the Sinification of religion, embody the core values of socialism, and safeguard national unity, ethnic unity, religious harmony, and social stability.” In practice, writes the sociologist Massimo Introvigne in Bitter Winter, “religious organizations exist to promote the CCP and its ideology, rather than religion.”

“The CCP has become unsettled about losing the battle for heart allegiances of the people, especially to organized religions,” Adrian Zenz, a leading researcher on Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, wrote to me. He suggested that policies now being implemented among Hui Muslims elsewhere in China were initially enacted in Xinjiang as a testing ground. Chen Quanguo, who became Xinjiang’s party secretary in 2016, introduced repressive ethnic and religious policies that he first developed as a party chief in Tibet and has overseen the build-out of mass detention centers. Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Chen and other officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

But Chen’s work is spreading. Xinjiang has hosted cadres from Ningxia and Gansu, home of Hui enclaves, to share best practices to counter extremism. In a telling piece on China’s stance on human rights, Chang Jian, the director of the Research Center for Human Rights at Nankai University, wrote in the party mouthpiece China Daily that “other regions with similar conditions could draw some lessons from Xinjiang’s fight against terrorism and violent extremism.”

Zenz is unsure how far policies outside Xinjiang will go, but he’s sure of the long-term trajectory. “The Sinicization of religion is a pretext for the CCP to gain control and ultimately to subjugate these religions,” he said. Alarmingly, Sinicization is as vaguely defined as the “Smash the Four Olds” campaign that led to the Shadian incident, and similarly it is being carried out by zealous ideologues with too much power and little accountability.

When I asked about detention centers for Muslim communities outside Xinjiang, Zenz replied, “That possibility exists.”


During Ramadan last year, Ma Zhijun, who tried to convert me in the plaza of the Grand Mosque the year before, could not go to mosque for prayers. All mosques in Shadian were closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The town had no official cases, however, so the atmosphere allowed for a different mosque to open each evening for the final prayers of the day. Religious leaders were also vigilant about hand sanitizer and masks. While party officials in Xinjiang forbade fasting during Ramadan—even forcing students to eat at school and compelling Muslim restaurants to serve pork and alcohol—in Shadian, of all places, no one wanted to risk conflict or blur the lines between public health and religious restrictions.

By May 23, when Eid al-Fitr arrived, the Grand Mosque had reopened and welcomed all to communal prayer again—perhaps to preclude a gathering at the martyrs’ memorial. Ma was out for prayer when I called him from the United States, and he called me back at 3 a.m., not realizing the time difference. When I didn’t answer, he texted: “Hello friend. May the Great Creator God guide you along the path of Islam. Aminai.”

May God guide you as well, friend, in the days ahead. Assalamu alaikum.


 
SHADIAN, China—“Assalamu alaikum,” Ma Zhijun greeted me in Arabic, extending me peace and a broad toothy smile. We were strangers eyeing the same beef skewers in front of Shadian’s Grand Mosque, the largest in southwestern China, at the end of Ramadan in 2019. Food stalls lined Moslem Avenue; Eid al-Fitr had finally arrived, and Muslims in the Chinese town were eager to make up for a month of daytime fasting.

“Are you one of our Muslims?” he asked when I returned his greeting, perhaps puzzled by my proper beard but poor Arabic. “No,” I replied, prompting Ma’s invitation to the shade of palm trees that lined the mosque plaza, a refuge from the baking June sun. There, for much of the afternoon, he shared his faith with me until the call to prayer beckoned him away.

I welcomed the conversation. An imam in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, had described Ramadan for me in cursory English: “no eating, no drinking, and no sexing.” But I knew there were more restrictions in Shadian than merely fasting. Muslims in Shadian, a small town that’s now a suburb of Gejiu city in Yunnan, are in the eye of an increasingly paranoid and Islamophobic state—especially because of the city’s history as a flash point between Communist Party power and Islamic faith.

China’s religious policies are tightening, including new regulations enacted in 2018 and 2020, and Muslim communities across China are feeling the pressure. Uyghur Muslims, numbering about 12 million, have faced increasingly repressive policies in Xinjiang since ethnic conflict in 2009; an estimated 1 million have been placed in detention camps for what the state calls “reeducation” and “counterextremism training.” Hui Muslims are almost as numerous but rarely in the headlines due to better integration into Han-majority China. But in recent years, attitudes toward Hui have shifted, and some in the community fear the impact. I went to Shadian to find out how residents were experiencing the changes and where China’s religious policy was going.

The Grand Mosque is aptly named. Its crescent-topped green dome and soaring minarets were fashioned after the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, built and used by Muhammad himself and now where he is entombed. It towers over Shadian—grandiose for a town of fewer than 20,000 people—but that was the plan. In the early 2000s, local officials decided to turn Shadian into a four-star Islamic tourism destination, and a new mosque was central to their vision. Local Muslims, flush with cash from private mining and China’s booming economy, donated generously while the government provided the land and signed off on the Middle Eastern design. Party officials, officially atheist themselves, even spearheaded an alcohol ban to make Shadian more authentically Muslim. They weren’t the only ones: Ningxia, another Hui-majority region, transformed itself into a center of the halal meat trade. China was hungry for foreign investment, and that included Middle Eastern money—even when it was used to spread religion.


In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork.

That was an ironic vision, given the history of the town. Yunnan had been the heart of the Panthay Rebellion, a Muslim revolt in the 1850s that established an effectively independent sultanate in southeastern China for nearly 20 years. Other memories were closer and bloodier. The Shadian incident, as it was euphemistically termed, still lingered.

In 1968, China was at the height of the campaign to “smash the Four Olds.” The campaign to destroy pre-Communist elements of Chinese culture—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—played out with fanatical zeal in different ways across China, leaving smashed buildings and burnt books behind it.

In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork. One mosque in Shadian was converted into a propaganda center where the Communist work teams lived, raised, and slaughtered pigs and allegedly threw bones into the well used for ritual ablutions before prayer. Hui formed militias and sent appeals to the provincial and central governments for religious freedoms supposedly afforded to citizens under the 1954 constitution of the People’s Republic of China. But the petitions went unheeded—and party officials saw resistance as insurrection.



Finally, in July 1975, the People’s Liberation Army was ordered to suppress the Hui resistance in Shadian. Troops surrounded the town before dawn on July 29 and for the next seven days bombed it with heavy artillery. “Shadian looked like a heap of ruins,” wrote Ma Ping, the head of the Institute for Hui and Islamic Studies at the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences. “You could see pieces of arms and legs shredded. The air reeked with the nauseating stench of rotting corpses.” Some estimates suggest 1,500 people were killed, almost one-fourth of Shadian’s population at the time.

In 1979, after Mao Zedong had died and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had subsided, the liberal-minded national leader Hu Yaobang, himself purged twice in the past, wrote a letter absolving Shadian Hui of blame and issuing reparations. The same army that had reduced Shadian to rubble was ordered to return and rebuild it. By the 2000s, officials were reimagining a town once famous for religious clashes as a site of peaceful tourism.

But Shadian’s ambitions for tourism vanished in March 2014. Eight Uyghurs from Xinjiang armed themselves with knives, entered the Kunming Railway Station, and began slashing passengers indiscriminately. Thirty-one people were killed and more than 140 injured before four of the attackers were shot and one apprehended. The other three fled to Shadian, where they were arrested two days later.

Prior to this event, Hui and Uyghur Muslims were distinct in the minds of China’s Han majority. Many regarded Hui as the model Muslim minority. “Hui look Han, talk like Han, and have assimilated better into a Han-centric society,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uyghur technopolitics. “But Uyghurs look foreign, have their own language, and have a territorial homeland.” According to Byler, the double threat of separatism and Islamist terrorism is why the Chinese Communist Party’s policy toward Uyghurs in Xinjiang has been so brutal.

Two imams outside the Grand Mosque in Shadian, China.

Shortly before sunrise, two imams pose for a photo after leading congregational prayers at Shadian’s Grand Mosque on June 5, 2019, the day after Eid al-Fitr. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
But after the Kunming attack, public sentiment toward Hui Muslims hardened, and Shadian was labeled a center for “ethnoreligious extremism.” Netizens complained about the fact that national food delivery apps provided halal options and about the alcohol bans in Shadian and some other predominantly Muslim areas. “Chinese people have the unalienable right to drink alcohol,” wrote one enraged netizen in the aftermath of the attack. Meantime, the 2015 Paris attacks and Islamic State violence in Syria and Iraq reinforced perceptions of the threat of Islam, while Islamophobic narratives generated by Western far-right activists were fed back into China through WeChat groups, unbothered by otherwise vigilant censors.

“That is not our Islam!” Ma Xiaoxiao told me. She had large dark eyes and a round face framed by a fashionable bob cut. A mutual friend had introduced me to her husband, Wang Gang, who was driving their Range Rover with the air conditioning blasting. “We are not…” she paused, searching for the English word, “…kongbu fenzi!”

“Terrorists,” I filled in.

“Right! We are not terrorists. Those people use the Quran and religion to defend their bad actions.”

As a person of faith, I sympathized: “Many religious people don’t let Scriptures affect what they want to believe.”

Wang parked in an alley, and Ma put on a hijab, covering her hair and neck, before we strolled through a street market. “Everyone here still wears one,” she said, almost apologetically. Ma and Wang live in eastern China, where few wear traditional Muslim dress. Having met attending a foreign university, they admitted their thinking was different than many Hui in Shadian. In fact, Wang wasn’t Muslim until he fell in love with Ma and converted.

While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization.

“Here the older generation is still closed-minded,” she continued. “Our generation wants to go out to understand and share with the world. I believe mine, and you can believe yours,” she told me. “That’s what I love about our mosque here. It has no walls. It’s open to everyone—inclusive—like our Islam.”


But as we drove past the Grand Mosque, a Chinese flag flew front and center flanked by a black surveillance van labeled “Police.” While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping did not mince his words to the 19th Party Congress: The Communist Party will “insist on the Sinicization of Chinese religions and provide active guidance for religion and socialism to coexist.”

Then in 2018, party leadership implemented revised regulations on religious affairs followed by five-year plans to Sinicize Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—those religions permitted in China that are most suspect of foreign influence. As these sweeping regulations have come into effect, well-known Protestant house churches in Beijing and Chengdu have been closed, the Communist Party has exerted authority to appoint Catholic bishops, and efforts to retranslate and annotate the Bible are underway to establish a “correct understanding” of the text.

Muslim communities have seen mosques demolished or domes and crescents removed from them. Religious education has been banned, and unauthorized religious activities are prohibited. The Religious Affairs Bureau in one county has ordered mosques to play the Chinese national anthem instead of adhan, the call to prayer, and last spring I visited three house mosques that had been raided and chained shut by authorities, as reported by Foreign Policy.

Policies are always localized, so enforcement varies across China. In Shadian, sometimes the government’s approach appears softer, while other times it wants to make an example of Shadian to China’s Muslim communities. “Other Hui are watching us,” a groundskeeper at a mosque told me. “The government knows Shadian is a flash point. That’s because of our history.”

In 1979, a memorial was also erected at the top of Phoenix Tail Mountain overlooking the town. I walked up a narrow concrete road, winding past hundreds of unmarked burial mounds to the monument. Victims’ names are carved into the base: Ma Jinguo, Ma Jiacai, Ma Fuguang, all sharing a surname as common as “Smith” among Chinese Muslims. A stone pillar reaches 30 feet into the sky, topped with a crescent moon—like those now being forcibly removed across China. The pillar reads, “Memorial to the Shadian Incident Martyrs.”

Men used to cram shoulder to shoulder on their prayer rugs around the monument every Eid al-Fitr, recalled Li Minghong, a childhood friend of Ma Xiaoxiao. “I grew up saying prayers there,” she told me, “but most young people don’t know a lot about it. We were educated to love this country and believe the government.” In 2008, prayers were moved to the newly built Grand Mosque. “I thought it was a space issue,” Li said, “but later I learned that the government did not want people to gather at the memorial.” That Eid al-Fitr, I was alone at the monument.

Worshippers gather at a mosque in Shadian, China.

Men gather at a neighborhood mosque in Shadian for evening prayers the day after Eid al-Fitr on June 5, 2019. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
Restrictions have tightened in Shadian since my visit. Leading up to National Day in October 2019, hijabs were prohibited in state institutions like schools and universities, hospitals, and government buildings. All kindergartens, most of which had provided religious education, have closed, with the exception of one government-operated school. Arabic script is now prohibited.

“There’s no policy on paper, but there’s pressure,” said Ruslan Yusupov of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yusupov did two years of fieldwork in Shadian and has felt the tightening environment. “It travels in the atmosphere. Everyone talks about it. You inhale it. The government will let you know what it wants you to know.”


Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage.

These are trends across China, not just in Shadian. Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage. Some vendors have simply changed their halal signs from the traditional green logo to red as a way around the ban. Street signs in Ningxia that once included Arabic to help overseas Muslims do business there have been replaced. Even a river named after one of Muhammad’s wives has been renamed to sound more Chinese.

“It’s so counterproductive,” one Western academic told me on condition of anonymity due to their active research in China. “The government and businesses have spent millions developing the halal industry and attracting overseas investment and tourism. Now all for nothing.” More foreboding is that the authorities are now forcing academics to limit research and remove academic articles on Hui issues—“even innocuous topics such as culture, dress, and food,” the scholar added, flabbergasted.

In February 2020, additional regulations went into effect to reinforce the revised religious regulations from 2018. The new Administrative Measures for Religious Groups state that “religious organizations must support the leadership of the Communist Party of China,” or CCP. They must also “adhere to the Sinification of religion, embody the core values of socialism, and safeguard national unity, ethnic unity, religious harmony, and social stability.” In practice, writes the sociologist Massimo Introvigne in Bitter Winter, “religious organizations exist to promote the CCP and its ideology, rather than religion.”

“The CCP has become unsettled about losing the battle for heart allegiances of the people, especially to organized religions,” Adrian Zenz, a leading researcher on Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, wrote to me. He suggested that policies now being implemented among Hui Muslims elsewhere in China were initially enacted in Xinjiang as a testing ground. Chen Quanguo, who became Xinjiang’s party secretary in 2016, introduced repressive ethnic and religious policies that he first developed as a party chief in Tibet and has overseen the build-out of mass detention centers. Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Chen and other officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

But Chen’s work is spreading. Xinjiang has hosted cadres from Ningxia and Gansu, home of Hui enclaves, to share best practices to counter extremism. In a telling piece on China’s stance on human rights, Chang Jian, the director of the Research Center for Human Rights at Nankai University, wrote in the party mouthpiece China Daily that “other regions with similar conditions could draw some lessons from Xinjiang’s fight against terrorism and violent extremism.”

Zenz is unsure how far policies outside Xinjiang will go, but he’s sure of the long-term trajectory. “The Sinicization of religion is a pretext for the CCP to gain control and ultimately to subjugate these religions,” he said. Alarmingly, Sinicization is as vaguely defined as the “Smash the Four Olds” campaign that led to the Shadian incident, and similarly it is being carried out by zealous ideologues with too much power and little accountability.

When I asked about detention centers for Muslim communities outside Xinjiang, Zenz replied, “That possibility exists.”


During Ramadan last year, Ma Zhijun, who tried to convert me in the plaza of the Grand Mosque the year before, could not go to mosque for prayers. All mosques in Shadian were closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The town had no official cases, however, so the atmosphere allowed for a different mosque to open each evening for the final prayers of the day. Religious leaders were also vigilant about hand sanitizer and masks. While party officials in Xinjiang forbade fasting during Ramadan—even forcing students to eat at school and compelling Muslim restaurants to serve pork and alcohol—in Shadian, of all places, no one wanted to risk conflict or blur the lines between public health and religious restrictions.

By May 23, when Eid al-Fitr arrived, the Grand Mosque had reopened and welcomed all to communal prayer again—perhaps to preclude a gathering at the martyrs’ memorial. Ma was out for prayer when I called him from the United States, and he called me back at 3 a.m., not realizing the time difference. When I didn’t answer, he texted: “Hello friend. May the Great Creator God guide you along the path of Islam. Aminai.”

May God guide you as well, friend, in the days ahead. Assalamu alaikum.



Salams to all.

Well research and with supporting alibis. Thank you for posting real facts vs the fake news being allowed and posted by sponsored agents on this forum.
 
they have done much to cover up this issue but we have here on PDF good senior members who counter the fake news with real facts

You can never hide 2 things

The sunshine and the truth
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The author, a westerner, devoid any actual intuitive insight, nor any actual spiritual intellect, judges things based on face value and has little to zero prowess on understanding the world shaping since the last 2000 years.

His interpretation of China's "Islamophobia" is limited to his Western (inept) mindset. Since the West has always sought (desperately so) to find the differences and clashes of cultures and of religion, as a means to further their own objectives and agenda.

He is a slave of the mentality used by the West since it began it's colonization of the planet, "Divide and Conquer." So to that effect, he uses the whole "China is oppressing the Uyghurs who are Muslims." China vs Islam has a nice ring to it (if you're westerner), as it creates the good guys vs bad guys scenario. Not forgetting the fact the two entities in this equation (China vs Islam) constitute nearly half the world's population, as it stands China has a 1.3 billion population, whereas in Islam there are over 2 billion Muslims on the planet.

Propagating such a scenario is likely for the benefit of the West.

However, China doesn't perceive Islam as a threat, so much as it sees how the West has used Muslims in the past, using misguided ideologies, to proliferate terror against independent nations. History is littered with West's footprints of arming, supporting, training, infiltrating, directing and influencing terrorism amongst Muslims, to spread their terror over the rest, doesn't matter whether you're a non-Muslim or Muslim. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon are living examples of the West's factory rolled out brand of Terrorists, masquerading around as Muslims, carrying heinous crimes against the rest of humanity.

Of course, the accursed Wahhabi-Salafi algae has managed to spread through the Islamic World, doesn't bode as a sign of reassurance for non-Muslim States that Muslims won't be a threat to them. Now add Turkey to the mix, and you have an "Amped Mutant Combo" of terrorists parading around as saviors or warriors of Islam. In reality, whether it be Turkish, Saud-family, Qatari elites or Emirati elites, who sponsor terrorists or be it the West itself, they're all p!g$ of the same sty.

So it is this threat that China or any country would identify, not Islam. The Zionist-Swines have cultivated the concept of weaponizing misguided Muslims (in name only) and marketing their "Color Revolutions" to dismember or "Balkanize" countries which refuse to live under a Western Hegemonic World Order. And Uyghurs, whose display affinity to their Turkic roots, rather than Islam (as politicized by the West) are sought by the West as an instrument to sow discord between China, Pakistan and Iran who are the largest recipients of China's massive BRI Infrastructure Investment drive. Pakistan is China's foremost partner nation on all fronts, is also the Second Largest Muslim Populated country in the World. Pakistan also is the First and Only (to date) Muslim country that has full spectrum nuclear arsenal.

Therefore any Western journalist that harps about China's Islamophobia, is parroting the Western narrative that furthers Western agenda to create animosity between China and the Islamic World, two of the largest population which make up nearly half the entire population of the planet. Anyone who fails to see this deception playing, has a serious deficiency in discerning intelligence.
 
The author, a westerner, devoid any actual intuitive insight, nor any actual spiritual intellect, judges things based on face value and has little to zero prowess on understanding the world shaping since the last 2000 years.

His interpretation of China's "Islamophobia" is limited to his Western (inept) mindset. Since the West has always sought (desperately so) to find the differences and clashes of cultures and of religion, as a means to further their own objectives and agenda.

He is a slave of the mentality used by the West since it began it's colonization of the planet, "Divide and Conquer." So to that effect, he uses the whole "China is oppressing the Uyghurs who are Muslims." China vs Islam has a nice ring to it (if you're westerner), as it creates the good guys vs bad guys scenario. Not forgetting the fact the two entities in this equation (China vs Islam) constitute nearly half the world's population, as it stands China has a 1.3 billion population, whereas in Islam there are over 2 billion Muslims on the planet.

Propagating such a scenario is likely for the benefit of the West.

However, China doesn't perceive Islam as a threat, so much as it sees how the West has used Muslims in the past, using misguided ideologies, to proliferate terror against independent nations. History is littered with West's footprints of arming, supporting, training, infiltrating, directing and influencing terrorism amongst Muslims, to spread their terror over the rest, doesn't matter whether you're a non-Muslim or Muslim. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon are living examples of the West's factory rolled out brand of Terrorists, masquerading around as Muslims, carrying heinous crimes against the rest of humanity.

Of course, the accursed Wahhabi-Salafi algae has managed to spread through the Islamic World, doesn't bode as a sign of reassurance for non-Muslim States that Muslims won't be a threat to them. Now add Turkey to the mix, and you have an "Amped Mutant Combo" of terrorists parading around as saviors or warriors of Islam. In reality, whether it be Turkish, Saud-family, Qatari elites or Emirati elites, who sponsor terrorists or be it the West itself, they're all p!g$ of the same sty.

So it is this threat that China or any country would identify, not Islam. The Zionist-Swines have cultivated the concept of weaponizing misguided Muslims (in name only) and marketing their "Color Revolutions" to dismember or "Balkanize" countries which refuse to live under a Western Hegemonic World Order. And Uyghurs, whose display affinity to their Turkic roots, rather than Islam (as politicized by the West) are sought by the West as an instrument to sow discord between China, Pakistan and Iran who are the largest recipients of China's massive BRI Infrastructure Investment drive. Pakistan is China's foremost partner nation on all fronts, is also the Second Largest Muslim Populated country in the World. Pakistan also is the First and Only (to date) Muslim country that has full spectrum nuclear arsenal.

Therefore any Western journalist that harps about China's Islamophobia, is parroting the Western narrative that furthers Western agenda to create animosity between China and the Islamic World, two of the largest population which make up nearly half the entire population of the planet. Anyone who fails to see this deception playing, has a serious deficiency in discerning intelligence.
Well written bro, nothing but respect:china::cheers::pakistan:
 
You can never hide 2 things

The sunshine and the truth

Bro, the first one - Sunshine can be hidden, Eclipse and for the argumentative, Nuclear Winter.

Second one - Truth, is almost always hidden by the victor, nowadays by the Western Mainstream Media.

But I would like to end my post with one thing .... In the Battle between Truth and falsehood, Truth will always vanquish falsehood. The ones who are able to identify the Truth, are always guided by Allah Subhanahu Wata'aalah, not the West, who have a known history of lies, deceit, thievery and murder.
 
SHADIAN, China—“Assalamu alaikum,” Ma Zhijun greeted me in Arabic, extending me peace and a broad toothy smile. We were strangers eyeing the same beef skewers in front of Shadian’s Grand Mosque, the largest in southwestern China, at the end of Ramadan in 2019. Food stalls lined Moslem Avenue; Eid al-Fitr had finally arrived, and Muslims in the Chinese town were eager to make up for a month of daytime fasting.

“Are you one of our Muslims?” he asked when I returned his greeting, perhaps puzzled by my proper beard but poor Arabic. “No,” I replied, prompting Ma’s invitation to the shade of palm trees that lined the mosque plaza, a refuge from the baking June sun. There, for much of the afternoon, he shared his faith with me until the call to prayer beckoned him away.

I welcomed the conversation. An imam in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, had described Ramadan for me in cursory English: “no eating, no drinking, and no sexing.” But I knew there were more restrictions in Shadian than merely fasting. Muslims in Shadian, a small town that’s now a suburb of Gejiu city in Yunnan, are in the eye of an increasingly paranoid and Islamophobic state—especially because of the city’s history as a flash point between Communist Party power and Islamic faith.

China’s religious policies are tightening, including new regulations enacted in 2018 and 2020, and Muslim communities across China are feeling the pressure. Uyghur Muslims, numbering about 12 million, have faced increasingly repressive policies in Xinjiang since ethnic conflict in 2009; an estimated 1 million have been placed in detention camps for what the state calls “reeducation” and “counterextremism training.” Hui Muslims are almost as numerous but rarely in the headlines due to better integration into Han-majority China. But in recent years, attitudes toward Hui have shifted, and some in the community fear the impact. I went to Shadian to find out how residents were experiencing the changes and where China’s religious policy was going.

The Grand Mosque is aptly named. Its crescent-topped green dome and soaring minarets were fashioned after the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, built and used by Muhammad himself and now where he is entombed. It towers over Shadian—grandiose for a town of fewer than 20,000 people—but that was the plan. In the early 2000s, local officials decided to turn Shadian into a four-star Islamic tourism destination, and a new mosque was central to their vision. Local Muslims, flush with cash from private mining and China’s booming economy, donated generously while the government provided the land and signed off on the Middle Eastern design. Party officials, officially atheist themselves, even spearheaded an alcohol ban to make Shadian more authentically Muslim. They weren’t the only ones: Ningxia, another Hui-majority region, transformed itself into a center of the halal meat trade. China was hungry for foreign investment, and that included Middle Eastern money—even when it was used to spread religion.


In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork.

That was an ironic vision, given the history of the town. Yunnan had been the heart of the Panthay Rebellion, a Muslim revolt in the 1850s that established an effectively independent sultanate in southeastern China for nearly 20 years. Other memories were closer and bloodier. The Shadian incident, as it was euphemistically termed, still lingered.

In 1968, China was at the height of the campaign to “smash the Four Olds.” The campaign to destroy pre-Communist elements of Chinese culture—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—played out with fanatical zeal in different ways across China, leaving smashed buildings and burnt books behind it.

In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork. One mosque in Shadian was converted into a propaganda center where the Communist work teams lived, raised, and slaughtered pigs and allegedly threw bones into the well used for ritual ablutions before prayer. Hui formed militias and sent appeals to the provincial and central governments for religious freedoms supposedly afforded to citizens under the 1954 constitution of the People’s Republic of China. But the petitions went unheeded—and party officials saw resistance as insurrection.



Finally, in July 1975, the People’s Liberation Army was ordered to suppress the Hui resistance in Shadian. Troops surrounded the town before dawn on July 29 and for the next seven days bombed it with heavy artillery. “Shadian looked like a heap of ruins,” wrote Ma Ping, the head of the Institute for Hui and Islamic Studies at the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences. “You could see pieces of arms and legs shredded. The air reeked with the nauseating stench of rotting corpses.” Some estimates suggest 1,500 people were killed, almost one-fourth of Shadian’s population at the time.

In 1979, after Mao Zedong had died and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had subsided, the liberal-minded national leader Hu Yaobang, himself purged twice in the past, wrote a letter absolving Shadian Hui of blame and issuing reparations. The same army that had reduced Shadian to rubble was ordered to return and rebuild it. By the 2000s, officials were reimagining a town once famous for religious clashes as a site of peaceful tourism.

But Shadian’s ambitions for tourism vanished in March 2014. Eight Uyghurs from Xinjiang armed themselves with knives, entered the Kunming Railway Station, and began slashing passengers indiscriminately. Thirty-one people were killed and more than 140 injured before four of the attackers were shot and one apprehended. The other three fled to Shadian, where they were arrested two days later.

Prior to this event, Hui and Uyghur Muslims were distinct in the minds of China’s Han majority. Many regarded Hui as the model Muslim minority. “Hui look Han, talk like Han, and have assimilated better into a Han-centric society,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uyghur technopolitics. “But Uyghurs look foreign, have their own language, and have a territorial homeland.” According to Byler, the double threat of separatism and Islamist terrorism is why the Chinese Communist Party’s policy toward Uyghurs in Xinjiang has been so brutal.

Two imams outside the Grand Mosque in Shadian, China.

Shortly before sunrise, two imams pose for a photo after leading congregational prayers at Shadian’s Grand Mosque on June 5, 2019, the day after Eid al-Fitr. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
But after the Kunming attack, public sentiment toward Hui Muslims hardened, and Shadian was labeled a center for “ethnoreligious extremism.” Netizens complained about the fact that national food delivery apps provided halal options and about the alcohol bans in Shadian and some other predominantly Muslim areas. “Chinese people have the unalienable right to drink alcohol,” wrote one enraged netizen in the aftermath of the attack. Meantime, the 2015 Paris attacks and Islamic State violence in Syria and Iraq reinforced perceptions of the threat of Islam, while Islamophobic narratives generated by Western far-right activists were fed back into China through WeChat groups, unbothered by otherwise vigilant censors.

“That is not our Islam!” Ma Xiaoxiao told me. She had large dark eyes and a round face framed by a fashionable bob cut. A mutual friend had introduced me to her husband, Wang Gang, who was driving their Range Rover with the air conditioning blasting. “We are not…” she paused, searching for the English word, “…kongbu fenzi!”

“Terrorists,” I filled in.

“Right! We are not terrorists. Those people use the Quran and religion to defend their bad actions.”

As a person of faith, I sympathized: “Many religious people don’t let Scriptures affect what they want to believe.”

Wang parked in an alley, and Ma put on a hijab, covering her hair and neck, before we strolled through a street market. “Everyone here still wears one,” she said, almost apologetically. Ma and Wang live in eastern China, where few wear traditional Muslim dress. Having met attending a foreign university, they admitted their thinking was different than many Hui in Shadian. In fact, Wang wasn’t Muslim until he fell in love with Ma and converted.

While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization.

“Here the older generation is still closed-minded,” she continued. “Our generation wants to go out to understand and share with the world. I believe mine, and you can believe yours,” she told me. “That’s what I love about our mosque here. It has no walls. It’s open to everyone—inclusive—like our Islam.”


But as we drove past the Grand Mosque, a Chinese flag flew front and center flanked by a black surveillance van labeled “Police.” While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping did not mince his words to the 19th Party Congress: The Communist Party will “insist on the Sinicization of Chinese religions and provide active guidance for religion and socialism to coexist.”

Then in 2018, party leadership implemented revised regulations on religious affairs followed by five-year plans to Sinicize Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—those religions permitted in China that are most suspect of foreign influence. As these sweeping regulations have come into effect, well-known Protestant house churches in Beijing and Chengdu have been closed, the Communist Party has exerted authority to appoint Catholic bishops, and efforts to retranslate and annotate the Bible are underway to establish a “correct understanding” of the text.

Muslim communities have seen mosques demolished or domes and crescents removed from them. Religious education has been banned, and unauthorized religious activities are prohibited. The Religious Affairs Bureau in one county has ordered mosques to play the Chinese national anthem instead of adhan, the call to prayer, and last spring I visited three house mosques that had been raided and chained shut by authorities, as reported by Foreign Policy.

Policies are always localized, so enforcement varies across China. In Shadian, sometimes the government’s approach appears softer, while other times it wants to make an example of Shadian to China’s Muslim communities. “Other Hui are watching us,” a groundskeeper at a mosque told me. “The government knows Shadian is a flash point. That’s because of our history.”

In 1979, a memorial was also erected at the top of Phoenix Tail Mountain overlooking the town. I walked up a narrow concrete road, winding past hundreds of unmarked burial mounds to the monument. Victims’ names are carved into the base: Ma Jinguo, Ma Jiacai, Ma Fuguang, all sharing a surname as common as “Smith” among Chinese Muslims. A stone pillar reaches 30 feet into the sky, topped with a crescent moon—like those now being forcibly removed across China. The pillar reads, “Memorial to the Shadian Incident Martyrs.”

Men used to cram shoulder to shoulder on their prayer rugs around the monument every Eid al-Fitr, recalled Li Minghong, a childhood friend of Ma Xiaoxiao. “I grew up saying prayers there,” she told me, “but most young people don’t know a lot about it. We were educated to love this country and believe the government.” In 2008, prayers were moved to the newly built Grand Mosque. “I thought it was a space issue,” Li said, “but later I learned that the government did not want people to gather at the memorial.” That Eid al-Fitr, I was alone at the monument.

Worshippers gather at a mosque in Shadian, China.

Men gather at a neighborhood mosque in Shadian for evening prayers the day after Eid al-Fitr on June 5, 2019. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
Restrictions have tightened in Shadian since my visit. Leading up to National Day in October 2019, hijabs were prohibited in state institutions like schools and universities, hospitals, and government buildings. All kindergartens, most of which had provided religious education, have closed, with the exception of one government-operated school. Arabic script is now prohibited.

“There’s no policy on paper, but there’s pressure,” said Ruslan Yusupov of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yusupov did two years of fieldwork in Shadian and has felt the tightening environment. “It travels in the atmosphere. Everyone talks about it. You inhale it. The government will let you know what it wants you to know.”


Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage.

These are trends across China, not just in Shadian. Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage. Some vendors have simply changed their halal signs from the traditional green logo to red as a way around the ban. Street signs in Ningxia that once included Arabic to help overseas Muslims do business there have been replaced. Even a river named after one of Muhammad’s wives has been renamed to sound more Chinese.

“It’s so counterproductive,” one Western academic told me on condition of anonymity due to their active research in China. “The government and businesses have spent millions developing the halal industry and attracting overseas investment and tourism. Now all for nothing.” More foreboding is that the authorities are now forcing academics to limit research and remove academic articles on Hui issues—“even innocuous topics such as culture, dress, and food,” the scholar added, flabbergasted.

In February 2020, additional regulations went into effect to reinforce the revised religious regulations from 2018. The new Administrative Measures for Religious Groups state that “religious organizations must support the leadership of the Communist Party of China,” or CCP. They must also “adhere to the Sinification of religion, embody the core values of socialism, and safeguard national unity, ethnic unity, religious harmony, and social stability.” In practice, writes the sociologist Massimo Introvigne in Bitter Winter, “religious organizations exist to promote the CCP and its ideology, rather than religion.”

“The CCP has become unsettled about losing the battle for heart allegiances of the people, especially to organized religions,” Adrian Zenz, a leading researcher on Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, wrote to me. He suggested that policies now being implemented among Hui Muslims elsewhere in China were initially enacted in Xinjiang as a testing ground. Chen Quanguo, who became Xinjiang’s party secretary in 2016, introduced repressive ethnic and religious policies that he first developed as a party chief in Tibet and has overseen the build-out of mass detention centers. Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Chen and other officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

But Chen’s work is spreading. Xinjiang has hosted cadres from Ningxia and Gansu, home of Hui enclaves, to share best practices to counter extremism. In a telling piece on China’s stance on human rights, Chang Jian, the director of the Research Center for Human Rights at Nankai University, wrote in the party mouthpiece China Daily that “other regions with similar conditions could draw some lessons from Xinjiang’s fight against terrorism and violent extremism.”

Zenz is unsure how far policies outside Xinjiang will go, but he’s sure of the long-term trajectory. “The Sinicization of religion is a pretext for the CCP to gain control and ultimately to subjugate these religions,” he said. Alarmingly, Sinicization is as vaguely defined as the “Smash the Four Olds” campaign that led to the Shadian incident, and similarly it is being carried out by zealous ideologues with too much power and little accountability.

When I asked about detention centers for Muslim communities outside Xinjiang, Zenz replied, “That possibility exists.”


During Ramadan last year, Ma Zhijun, who tried to convert me in the plaza of the Grand Mosque the year before, could not go to mosque for prayers. All mosques in Shadian were closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The town had no official cases, however, so the atmosphere allowed for a different mosque to open each evening for the final prayers of the day. Religious leaders were also vigilant about hand sanitizer and masks. While party officials in Xinjiang forbade fasting during Ramadan—even forcing students to eat at school and compelling Muslim restaurants to serve pork and alcohol—in Shadian, of all places, no one wanted to risk conflict or blur the lines between public health and religious restrictions.

By May 23, when Eid al-Fitr arrived, the Grand Mosque had reopened and welcomed all to communal prayer again—perhaps to preclude a gathering at the martyrs’ memorial. Ma was out for prayer when I called him from the United States, and he called me back at 3 a.m., not realizing the time difference. When I didn’t answer, he texted: “Hello friend. May the Great Creator God guide you along the path of Islam. Aminai.”

May God guide you as well, friend, in the days ahead. Assalamu alaikum.



wow, still manage to find time to defame China while finding oxygen now
 
SHADIAN, China—“Assalamu alaikum,” Ma Zhijun greeted me in Arabic, extending me peace and a broad toothy smile. We were strangers eyeing the same beef skewers in front of Shadian’s Grand Mosque, the largest in southwestern China, at the end of Ramadan in 2019. Food stalls lined Moslem Avenue; Eid al-Fitr had finally arrived, and Muslims in the Chinese town were eager to make up for a month of daytime fasting.

“Are you one of our Muslims?” he asked when I returned his greeting, perhaps puzzled by my proper beard but poor Arabic. “No,” I replied, prompting Ma’s invitation to the shade of palm trees that lined the mosque plaza, a refuge from the baking June sun. There, for much of the afternoon, he shared his faith with me until the call to prayer beckoned him away.

I welcomed the conversation. An imam in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, had described Ramadan for me in cursory English: “no eating, no drinking, and no sexing.” But I knew there were more restrictions in Shadian than merely fasting. Muslims in Shadian, a small town that’s now a suburb of Gejiu city in Yunnan, are in the eye of an increasingly paranoid and Islamophobic state—especially because of the city’s history as a flash point between Communist Party power and Islamic faith.

China’s religious policies are tightening, including new regulations enacted in 2018 and 2020, and Muslim communities across China are feeling the pressure. Uyghur Muslims, numbering about 12 million, have faced increasingly repressive policies in Xinjiang since ethnic conflict in 2009; an estimated 1 million have been placed in detention camps for what the state calls “reeducation” and “counterextremism training.” Hui Muslims are almost as numerous but rarely in the headlines due to better integration into Han-majority China. But in recent years, attitudes toward Hui have shifted, and some in the community fear the impact. I went to Shadian to find out how residents were experiencing the changes and where China’s religious policy was going.

The Grand Mosque is aptly named. Its crescent-topped green dome and soaring minarets were fashioned after the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, built and used by Muhammad himself and now where he is entombed. It towers over Shadian—grandiose for a town of fewer than 20,000 people—but that was the plan. In the early 2000s, local officials decided to turn Shadian into a four-star Islamic tourism destination, and a new mosque was central to their vision. Local Muslims, flush with cash from private mining and China’s booming economy, donated generously while the government provided the land and signed off on the Middle Eastern design. Party officials, officially atheist themselves, even spearheaded an alcohol ban to make Shadian more authentically Muslim. They weren’t the only ones: Ningxia, another Hui-majority region, transformed itself into a center of the halal meat trade. China was hungry for foreign investment, and that included Middle Eastern money—even when it was used to spread religion.


In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork.

That was an ironic vision, given the history of the town. Yunnan had been the heart of the Panthay Rebellion, a Muslim revolt in the 1850s that established an effectively independent sultanate in southeastern China for nearly 20 years. Other memories were closer and bloodier. The Shadian incident, as it was euphemistically termed, still lingered.

In 1968, China was at the height of the campaign to “smash the Four Olds.” The campaign to destroy pre-Communist elements of Chinese culture—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—played out with fanatical zeal in different ways across China, leaving smashed buildings and burnt books behind it.

In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork. One mosque in Shadian was converted into a propaganda center where the Communist work teams lived, raised, and slaughtered pigs and allegedly threw bones into the well used for ritual ablutions before prayer. Hui formed militias and sent appeals to the provincial and central governments for religious freedoms supposedly afforded to citizens under the 1954 constitution of the People’s Republic of China. But the petitions went unheeded—and party officials saw resistance as insurrection.



Finally, in July 1975, the People’s Liberation Army was ordered to suppress the Hui resistance in Shadian. Troops surrounded the town before dawn on July 29 and for the next seven days bombed it with heavy artillery. “Shadian looked like a heap of ruins,” wrote Ma Ping, the head of the Institute for Hui and Islamic Studies at the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences. “You could see pieces of arms and legs shredded. The air reeked with the nauseating stench of rotting corpses.” Some estimates suggest 1,500 people were killed, almost one-fourth of Shadian’s population at the time.

In 1979, after Mao Zedong had died and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had subsided, the liberal-minded national leader Hu Yaobang, himself purged twice in the past, wrote a letter absolving Shadian Hui of blame and issuing reparations. The same army that had reduced Shadian to rubble was ordered to return and rebuild it. By the 2000s, officials were reimagining a town once famous for religious clashes as a site of peaceful tourism.

But Shadian’s ambitions for tourism vanished in March 2014. Eight Uyghurs from Xinjiang armed themselves with knives, entered the Kunming Railway Station, and began slashing passengers indiscriminately. Thirty-one people were killed and more than 140 injured before four of the attackers were shot and one apprehended. The other three fled to Shadian, where they were arrested two days later.

Prior to this event, Hui and Uyghur Muslims were distinct in the minds of China’s Han majority. Many regarded Hui as the model Muslim minority. “Hui look Han, talk like Han, and have assimilated better into a Han-centric society,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uyghur technopolitics. “But Uyghurs look foreign, have their own language, and have a territorial homeland.” According to Byler, the double threat of separatism and Islamist terrorism is why the Chinese Communist Party’s policy toward Uyghurs in Xinjiang has been so brutal.

Two imams outside the Grand Mosque in Shadian, China.

Shortly before sunrise, two imams pose for a photo after leading congregational prayers at Shadian’s Grand Mosque on June 5, 2019, the day after Eid al-Fitr. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
But after the Kunming attack, public sentiment toward Hui Muslims hardened, and Shadian was labeled a center for “ethnoreligious extremism.” Netizens complained about the fact that national food delivery apps provided halal options and about the alcohol bans in Shadian and some other predominantly Muslim areas. “Chinese people have the unalienable right to drink alcohol,” wrote one enraged netizen in the aftermath of the attack. Meantime, the 2015 Paris attacks and Islamic State violence in Syria and Iraq reinforced perceptions of the threat of Islam, while Islamophobic narratives generated by Western far-right activists were fed back into China through WeChat groups, unbothered by otherwise vigilant censors.

“That is not our Islam!” Ma Xiaoxiao told me. She had large dark eyes and a round face framed by a fashionable bob cut. A mutual friend had introduced me to her husband, Wang Gang, who was driving their Range Rover with the air conditioning blasting. “We are not…” she paused, searching for the English word, “…kongbu fenzi!”

“Terrorists,” I filled in.

“Right! We are not terrorists. Those people use the Quran and religion to defend their bad actions.”

As a person of faith, I sympathized: “Many religious people don’t let Scriptures affect what they want to believe.”

Wang parked in an alley, and Ma put on a hijab, covering her hair and neck, before we strolled through a street market. “Everyone here still wears one,” she said, almost apologetically. Ma and Wang live in eastern China, where few wear traditional Muslim dress. Having met attending a foreign university, they admitted their thinking was different than many Hui in Shadian. In fact, Wang wasn’t Muslim until he fell in love with Ma and converted.

While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization.

“Here the older generation is still closed-minded,” she continued. “Our generation wants to go out to understand and share with the world. I believe mine, and you can believe yours,” she told me. “That’s what I love about our mosque here. It has no walls. It’s open to everyone—inclusive—like our Islam.”


But as we drove past the Grand Mosque, a Chinese flag flew front and center flanked by a black surveillance van labeled “Police.” While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping did not mince his words to the 19th Party Congress: The Communist Party will “insist on the Sinicization of Chinese religions and provide active guidance for religion and socialism to coexist.”

Then in 2018, party leadership implemented revised regulations on religious affairs followed by five-year plans to Sinicize Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—those religions permitted in China that are most suspect of foreign influence. As these sweeping regulations have come into effect, well-known Protestant house churches in Beijing and Chengdu have been closed, the Communist Party has exerted authority to appoint Catholic bishops, and efforts to retranslate and annotate the Bible are underway to establish a “correct understanding” of the text.

Muslim communities have seen mosques demolished or domes and crescents removed from them. Religious education has been banned, and unauthorized religious activities are prohibited. The Religious Affairs Bureau in one county has ordered mosques to play the Chinese national anthem instead of adhan, the call to prayer, and last spring I visited three house mosques that had been raided and chained shut by authorities, as reported by Foreign Policy.

Policies are always localized, so enforcement varies across China. In Shadian, sometimes the government’s approach appears softer, while other times it wants to make an example of Shadian to China’s Muslim communities. “Other Hui are watching us,” a groundskeeper at a mosque told me. “The government knows Shadian is a flash point. That’s because of our history.”

In 1979, a memorial was also erected at the top of Phoenix Tail Mountain overlooking the town. I walked up a narrow concrete road, winding past hundreds of unmarked burial mounds to the monument. Victims’ names are carved into the base: Ma Jinguo, Ma Jiacai, Ma Fuguang, all sharing a surname as common as “Smith” among Chinese Muslims. A stone pillar reaches 30 feet into the sky, topped with a crescent moon—like those now being forcibly removed across China. The pillar reads, “Memorial to the Shadian Incident Martyrs.”

Men used to cram shoulder to shoulder on their prayer rugs around the monument every Eid al-Fitr, recalled Li Minghong, a childhood friend of Ma Xiaoxiao. “I grew up saying prayers there,” she told me, “but most young people don’t know a lot about it. We were educated to love this country and believe the government.” In 2008, prayers were moved to the newly built Grand Mosque. “I thought it was a space issue,” Li said, “but later I learned that the government did not want people to gather at the memorial.” That Eid al-Fitr, I was alone at the monument.

Worshippers gather at a mosque in Shadian, China.

Men gather at a neighborhood mosque in Shadian for evening prayers the day after Eid al-Fitr on June 5, 2019. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
Restrictions have tightened in Shadian since my visit. Leading up to National Day in October 2019, hijabs were prohibited in state institutions like schools and universities, hospitals, and government buildings. All kindergartens, most of which had provided religious education, have closed, with the exception of one government-operated school. Arabic script is now prohibited.

“There’s no policy on paper, but there’s pressure,” said Ruslan Yusupov of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yusupov did two years of fieldwork in Shadian and has felt the tightening environment. “It travels in the atmosphere. Everyone talks about it. You inhale it. The government will let you know what it wants you to know.”


Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage.

These are trends across China, not just in Shadian. Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage. Some vendors have simply changed their halal signs from the traditional green logo to red as a way around the ban. Street signs in Ningxia that once included Arabic to help overseas Muslims do business there have been replaced. Even a river named after one of Muhammad’s wives has been renamed to sound more Chinese.

“It’s so counterproductive,” one Western academic told me on condition of anonymity due to their active research in China. “The government and businesses have spent millions developing the halal industry and attracting overseas investment and tourism. Now all for nothing.” More foreboding is that the authorities are now forcing academics to limit research and remove academic articles on Hui issues—“even innocuous topics such as culture, dress, and food,” the scholar added, flabbergasted.

In February 2020, additional regulations went into effect to reinforce the revised religious regulations from 2018. The new Administrative Measures for Religious Groups state that “religious organizations must support the leadership of the Communist Party of China,” or CCP. They must also “adhere to the Sinification of religion, embody the core values of socialism, and safeguard national unity, ethnic unity, religious harmony, and social stability.” In practice, writes the sociologist Massimo Introvigne in Bitter Winter, “religious organizations exist to promote the CCP and its ideology, rather than religion.”

“The CCP has become unsettled about losing the battle for heart allegiances of the people, especially to organized religions,” Adrian Zenz, a leading researcher on Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, wrote to me. He suggested that policies now being implemented among Hui Muslims elsewhere in China were initially enacted in Xinjiang as a testing ground. Chen Quanguo, who became Xinjiang’s party secretary in 2016, introduced repressive ethnic and religious policies that he first developed as a party chief in Tibet and has overseen the build-out of mass detention centers. Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Chen and other officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

But Chen’s work is spreading. Xinjiang has hosted cadres from Ningxia and Gansu, home of Hui enclaves, to share best practices to counter extremism. In a telling piece on China’s stance on human rights, Chang Jian, the director of the Research Center for Human Rights at Nankai University, wrote in the party mouthpiece China Daily that “other regions with similar conditions could draw some lessons from Xinjiang’s fight against terrorism and violent extremism.”

Zenz is unsure how far policies outside Xinjiang will go, but he’s sure of the long-term trajectory. “The Sinicization of religion is a pretext for the CCP to gain control and ultimately to subjugate these religions,” he said. Alarmingly, Sinicization is as vaguely defined as the “Smash the Four Olds” campaign that led to the Shadian incident, and similarly it is being carried out by zealous ideologues with too much power and little accountability.

When I asked about detention centers for Muslim communities outside Xinjiang, Zenz replied, “That possibility exists.”


During Ramadan last year, Ma Zhijun, who tried to convert me in the plaza of the Grand Mosque the year before, could not go to mosque for prayers. All mosques in Shadian were closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The town had no official cases, however, so the atmosphere allowed for a different mosque to open each evening for the final prayers of the day. Religious leaders were also vigilant about hand sanitizer and masks. While party officials in Xinjiang forbade fasting during Ramadan—even forcing students to eat at school and compelling Muslim restaurants to serve pork and alcohol—in Shadian, of all places, no one wanted to risk conflict or blur the lines between public health and religious restrictions.

By May 23, when Eid al-Fitr arrived, the Grand Mosque had reopened and welcomed all to communal prayer again—perhaps to preclude a gathering at the martyrs’ memorial. Ma was out for prayer when I called him from the United States, and he called me back at 3 a.m., not realizing the time difference. When I didn’t answer, he texted: “Hello friend. May the Great Creator God guide you along the path of Islam. Aminai.”

May God guide you as well, friend, in the days ahead. Assalamu alaikum.


Islam was a threat to US post 9/11. Now it's a blessing 🤣🤣🤣
 
SHADIAN, China—“Assalamu alaikum,” Ma Zhijun greeted me in Arabic, extending me peace and a broad toothy smile. We were strangers eyeing the same beef skewers in front of Shadian’s Grand Mosque, the largest in southwestern China, at the end of Ramadan in 2019. Food stalls lined Moslem Avenue; Eid al-Fitr had finally arrived, and Muslims in the Chinese town were eager to make up for a month of daytime fasting.

“Are you one of our Muslims?” he asked when I returned his greeting, perhaps puzzled by my proper beard but poor Arabic. “No,” I replied, prompting Ma’s invitation to the shade of palm trees that lined the mosque plaza, a refuge from the baking June sun. There, for much of the afternoon, he shared his faith with me until the call to prayer beckoned him away.

I welcomed the conversation. An imam in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, had described Ramadan for me in cursory English: “no eating, no drinking, and no sexing.” But I knew there were more restrictions in Shadian than merely fasting. Muslims in Shadian, a small town that’s now a suburb of Gejiu city in Yunnan, are in the eye of an increasingly paranoid and Islamophobic state—especially because of the city’s history as a flash point between Communist Party power and Islamic faith.

China’s religious policies are tightening, including new regulations enacted in 2018 and 2020, and Muslim communities across China are feeling the pressure. Uyghur Muslims, numbering about 12 million, have faced increasingly repressive policies in Xinjiang since ethnic conflict in 2009; an estimated 1 million have been placed in detention camps for what the state calls “reeducation” and “counterextremism training.” Hui Muslims are almost as numerous but rarely in the headlines due to better integration into Han-majority China. But in recent years, attitudes toward Hui have shifted, and some in the community fear the impact. I went to Shadian to find out how residents were experiencing the changes and where China’s religious policy was going.

The Grand Mosque is aptly named. Its crescent-topped green dome and soaring minarets were fashioned after the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, built and used by Muhammad himself and now where he is entombed. It towers over Shadian—grandiose for a town of fewer than 20,000 people—but that was the plan. In the early 2000s, local officials decided to turn Shadian into a four-star Islamic tourism destination, and a new mosque was central to their vision. Local Muslims, flush with cash from private mining and China’s booming economy, donated generously while the government provided the land and signed off on the Middle Eastern design. Party officials, officially atheist themselves, even spearheaded an alcohol ban to make Shadian more authentically Muslim. They weren’t the only ones: Ningxia, another Hui-majority region, transformed itself into a center of the halal meat trade. China was hungry for foreign investment, and that included Middle Eastern money—even when it was used to spread religion.


In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork.

That was an ironic vision, given the history of the town. Yunnan had been the heart of the Panthay Rebellion, a Muslim revolt in the 1850s that established an effectively independent sultanate in southeastern China for nearly 20 years. Other memories were closer and bloodier. The Shadian incident, as it was euphemistically termed, still lingered.

In 1968, China was at the height of the campaign to “smash the Four Olds.” The campaign to destroy pre-Communist elements of Chinese culture—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—played out with fanatical zeal in different ways across China, leaving smashed buildings and burnt books behind it.

In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork. One mosque in Shadian was converted into a propaganda center where the Communist work teams lived, raised, and slaughtered pigs and allegedly threw bones into the well used for ritual ablutions before prayer. Hui formed militias and sent appeals to the provincial and central governments for religious freedoms supposedly afforded to citizens under the 1954 constitution of the People’s Republic of China. But the petitions went unheeded—and party officials saw resistance as insurrection.



Finally, in July 1975, the People’s Liberation Army was ordered to suppress the Hui resistance in Shadian. Troops surrounded the town before dawn on July 29 and for the next seven days bombed it with heavy artillery. “Shadian looked like a heap of ruins,” wrote Ma Ping, the head of the Institute for Hui and Islamic Studies at the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences. “You could see pieces of arms and legs shredded. The air reeked with the nauseating stench of rotting corpses.” Some estimates suggest 1,500 people were killed, almost one-fourth of Shadian’s population at the time.

In 1979, after Mao Zedong had died and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had subsided, the liberal-minded national leader Hu Yaobang, himself purged twice in the past, wrote a letter absolving Shadian Hui of blame and issuing reparations. The same army that had reduced Shadian to rubble was ordered to return and rebuild it. By the 2000s, officials were reimagining a town once famous for religious clashes as a site of peaceful tourism.

But Shadian’s ambitions for tourism vanished in March 2014. Eight Uyghurs from Xinjiang armed themselves with knives, entered the Kunming Railway Station, and began slashing passengers indiscriminately. Thirty-one people were killed and more than 140 injured before four of the attackers were shot and one apprehended. The other three fled to Shadian, where they were arrested two days later.

Prior to this event, Hui and Uyghur Muslims were distinct in the minds of China’s Han majority. Many regarded Hui as the model Muslim minority. “Hui look Han, talk like Han, and have assimilated better into a Han-centric society,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uyghur technopolitics. “But Uyghurs look foreign, have their own language, and have a territorial homeland.” According to Byler, the double threat of separatism and Islamist terrorism is why the Chinese Communist Party’s policy toward Uyghurs in Xinjiang has been so brutal.

Two imams outside the Grand Mosque in Shadian, China.

Shortly before sunrise, two imams pose for a photo after leading congregational prayers at Shadian’s Grand Mosque on June 5, 2019, the day after Eid al-Fitr. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
But after the Kunming attack, public sentiment toward Hui Muslims hardened, and Shadian was labeled a center for “ethnoreligious extremism.” Netizens complained about the fact that national food delivery apps provided halal options and about the alcohol bans in Shadian and some other predominantly Muslim areas. “Chinese people have the unalienable right to drink alcohol,” wrote one enraged netizen in the aftermath of the attack. Meantime, the 2015 Paris attacks and Islamic State violence in Syria and Iraq reinforced perceptions of the threat of Islam, while Islamophobic narratives generated by Western far-right activists were fed back into China through WeChat groups, unbothered by otherwise vigilant censors.

“That is not our Islam!” Ma Xiaoxiao told me. She had large dark eyes and a round face framed by a fashionable bob cut. A mutual friend had introduced me to her husband, Wang Gang, who was driving their Range Rover with the air conditioning blasting. “We are not…” she paused, searching for the English word, “…kongbu fenzi!”

“Terrorists,” I filled in.

“Right! We are not terrorists. Those people use the Quran and religion to defend their bad actions.”

As a person of faith, I sympathized: “Many religious people don’t let Scriptures affect what they want to believe.”

Wang parked in an alley, and Ma put on a hijab, covering her hair and neck, before we strolled through a street market. “Everyone here still wears one,” she said, almost apologetically. Ma and Wang live in eastern China, where few wear traditional Muslim dress. Having met attending a foreign university, they admitted their thinking was different than many Hui in Shadian. In fact, Wang wasn’t Muslim until he fell in love with Ma and converted.

While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization.

“Here the older generation is still closed-minded,” she continued. “Our generation wants to go out to understand and share with the world. I believe mine, and you can believe yours,” she told me. “That’s what I love about our mosque here. It has no walls. It’s open to everyone—inclusive—like our Islam.”


But as we drove past the Grand Mosque, a Chinese flag flew front and center flanked by a black surveillance van labeled “Police.” While some Muslim practices might be loosening, China’s policies toward Hui Muslims are tightening in the name of Sinicization. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping did not mince his words to the 19th Party Congress: The Communist Party will “insist on the Sinicization of Chinese religions and provide active guidance for religion and socialism to coexist.”

Then in 2018, party leadership implemented revised regulations on religious affairs followed by five-year plans to Sinicize Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—those religions permitted in China that are most suspect of foreign influence. As these sweeping regulations have come into effect, well-known Protestant house churches in Beijing and Chengdu have been closed, the Communist Party has exerted authority to appoint Catholic bishops, and efforts to retranslate and annotate the Bible are underway to establish a “correct understanding” of the text.

Muslim communities have seen mosques demolished or domes and crescents removed from them. Religious education has been banned, and unauthorized religious activities are prohibited. The Religious Affairs Bureau in one county has ordered mosques to play the Chinese national anthem instead of adhan, the call to prayer, and last spring I visited three house mosques that had been raided and chained shut by authorities, as reported by Foreign Policy.

Policies are always localized, so enforcement varies across China. In Shadian, sometimes the government’s approach appears softer, while other times it wants to make an example of Shadian to China’s Muslim communities. “Other Hui are watching us,” a groundskeeper at a mosque told me. “The government knows Shadian is a flash point. That’s because of our history.”

In 1979, a memorial was also erected at the top of Phoenix Tail Mountain overlooking the town. I walked up a narrow concrete road, winding past hundreds of unmarked burial mounds to the monument. Victims’ names are carved into the base: Ma Jinguo, Ma Jiacai, Ma Fuguang, all sharing a surname as common as “Smith” among Chinese Muslims. A stone pillar reaches 30 feet into the sky, topped with a crescent moon—like those now being forcibly removed across China. The pillar reads, “Memorial to the Shadian Incident Martyrs.”

Men used to cram shoulder to shoulder on their prayer rugs around the monument every Eid al-Fitr, recalled Li Minghong, a childhood friend of Ma Xiaoxiao. “I grew up saying prayers there,” she told me, “but most young people don’t know a lot about it. We were educated to love this country and believe the government.” In 2008, prayers were moved to the newly built Grand Mosque. “I thought it was a space issue,” Li said, “but later I learned that the government did not want people to gather at the memorial.” That Eid al-Fitr, I was alone at the monument.

Worshippers gather at a mosque in Shadian, China.

Men gather at a neighborhood mosque in Shadian for evening prayers the day after Eid al-Fitr on June 5, 2019. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
Restrictions have tightened in Shadian since my visit. Leading up to National Day in October 2019, hijabs were prohibited in state institutions like schools and universities, hospitals, and government buildings. All kindergartens, most of which had provided religious education, have closed, with the exception of one government-operated school. Arabic script is now prohibited.

“There’s no policy on paper, but there’s pressure,” said Ruslan Yusupov of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yusupov did two years of fieldwork in Shadian and has felt the tightening environment. “It travels in the atmosphere. Everyone talks about it. You inhale it. The government will let you know what it wants you to know.”


Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage.

These are trends across China, not just in Shadian. Even the Chinese characters for “halal” have been prohibited in some provinces, forcing restaurants and street vendors to get creative to save their signage. Some vendors have simply changed their halal signs from the traditional green logo to red as a way around the ban. Street signs in Ningxia that once included Arabic to help overseas Muslims do business there have been replaced. Even a river named after one of Muhammad’s wives has been renamed to sound more Chinese.

“It’s so counterproductive,” one Western academic told me on condition of anonymity due to their active research in China. “The government and businesses have spent millions developing the halal industry and attracting overseas investment and tourism. Now all for nothing.” More foreboding is that the authorities are now forcing academics to limit research and remove academic articles on Hui issues—“even innocuous topics such as culture, dress, and food,” the scholar added, flabbergasted.

In February 2020, additional regulations went into effect to reinforce the revised religious regulations from 2018. The new Administrative Measures for Religious Groups state that “religious organizations must support the leadership of the Communist Party of China,” or CCP. They must also “adhere to the Sinification of religion, embody the core values of socialism, and safeguard national unity, ethnic unity, religious harmony, and social stability.” In practice, writes the sociologist Massimo Introvigne in Bitter Winter, “religious organizations exist to promote the CCP and its ideology, rather than religion.”

“The CCP has become unsettled about losing the battle for heart allegiances of the people, especially to organized religions,” Adrian Zenz, a leading researcher on Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, wrote to me. He suggested that policies now being implemented among Hui Muslims elsewhere in China were initially enacted in Xinjiang as a testing ground. Chen Quanguo, who became Xinjiang’s party secretary in 2016, introduced repressive ethnic and religious policies that he first developed as a party chief in Tibet and has overseen the build-out of mass detention centers. Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Chen and other officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

But Chen’s work is spreading. Xinjiang has hosted cadres from Ningxia and Gansu, home of Hui enclaves, to share best practices to counter extremism. In a telling piece on China’s stance on human rights, Chang Jian, the director of the Research Center for Human Rights at Nankai University, wrote in the party mouthpiece China Daily that “other regions with similar conditions could draw some lessons from Xinjiang’s fight against terrorism and violent extremism.”

Zenz is unsure how far policies outside Xinjiang will go, but he’s sure of the long-term trajectory. “The Sinicization of religion is a pretext for the CCP to gain control and ultimately to subjugate these religions,” he said. Alarmingly, Sinicization is as vaguely defined as the “Smash the Four Olds” campaign that led to the Shadian incident, and similarly it is being carried out by zealous ideologues with too much power and little accountability.

When I asked about detention centers for Muslim communities outside Xinjiang, Zenz replied, “That possibility exists.”


During Ramadan last year, Ma Zhijun, who tried to convert me in the plaza of the Grand Mosque the year before, could not go to mosque for prayers. All mosques in Shadian were closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The town had no official cases, however, so the atmosphere allowed for a different mosque to open each evening for the final prayers of the day. Religious leaders were also vigilant about hand sanitizer and masks. While party officials in Xinjiang forbade fasting during Ramadan—even forcing students to eat at school and compelling Muslim restaurants to serve pork and alcohol—in Shadian, of all places, no one wanted to risk conflict or blur the lines between public health and religious restrictions.

By May 23, when Eid al-Fitr arrived, the Grand Mosque had reopened and welcomed all to communal prayer again—perhaps to preclude a gathering at the martyrs’ memorial. Ma was out for prayer when I called him from the United States, and he called me back at 3 a.m., not realizing the time difference. When I didn’t answer, he texted: “Hello friend. May the Great Creator God guide you along the path of Islam. Aminai.”

May God guide you as well, friend, in the days ahead. Assalamu alaikum.



Still China will be friend , philosoper and guide of many Islamic country who doesn't say anything except, Allah, Ummah, Islam and Muslims.
 
In Shadian, mosques were closed, prayers were forbidden, Qurans were burned, and most accounts cite Han forcing Hui to eat pork.
Shortly before sunrise, two imams pose for a photo after leading congregational prayers at Shadian’s Grand Mosque on June 5, 2019, the day after Eid al-Fitr. MATTHEW CHITWOOD FOR FOREIGN POLICY
Excuse me, these two sentences are completely opposite, which one is true? Which one is a rumor? :omghaha: :omghaha: :omghaha:
 
Excuse me, these two sentences are completely opposite, which one is true? Which one is a rumor? :omghaha: :omghaha: :omghaha:

You are mixing up your time lines the first is post covid - mosques closed. 2020

the second pre-covid - mosques open. 2019
 
The author is actully Indian and the article is malicious in nature.. It only wants to villify China that is the only reason it exists.

Remember when these low IQ Hindvutas were busted saying we will turn The muslims against China to isolate them and that is the whole plan against all this propaganda articles from Xinjiang etc etc is to isolate China. You Think we are Dumb! The Mods should take such things very serious on this forum some people who really don't care about Islam are blackmailing China with Islam? Wanting to Isolate them on the world stage but it has backfired and nowadays they are getting tired of it. China's relations with various Muslim states has even increased
 
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