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Our columnist visits a harshly controlled region

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CHINA’s COMMUNIST PARTY has a message for Muslim citizens. It holds their religious freedoms dear—with a special emphasis on the freedom not to believe. The right to be secular runs like a thread through religious regulations enacted this year in Xinjiang, the far-western region that is home to 12m Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. The revised rules impose new controls on everything from religious teaching to mosque architecture, which should reflect Chinese style. The regulations talk of extremists warping minds and promoting terrorism. To prevent this, the rules state, no organisations or individual shall induce or coerce locals to believe or not believe in any religion.

This is in part a euphemism for enhanced controls on religion—in a region that at the peak of a security campaign in 2018 and 2019 saw perhaps a million of its Muslim residents locked in re-education camps. In part, an old argument is being revived. The right to believe or not believe is in China’s constitution. But a propaganda line is also taking shape: namely, that harsh rule in Xinjiang protects its residents’ free will.

Chaguan writes these words from eastern Xinjiang, where he spent the final days of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims forswear food and drink during daylight hours. Several times ordinary Uyghurs signalled that this has been a distressing Ramadan, during which it was risky to be caught fasting.

Over several hours one evening, your columnist watched hundreds of worshippers enter the Baida Si, or Great White Mosque, in the capital, Urumqi, for sunset and late-night prayers. After the session at sunset, those worshippers filed silently out, with no sign of the iftar supper that the mosque formerly served to believers, ending that day’s fast. As recently as 2015 those suppers were praised by official media. Newspapers photographed mosque workers preparing platters of lamb, flatbread and watermelon. Not this year, locals said. The iftar suppers are “no more”.

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Many mosques have simply closed. Such limits to piety are called expressions of choice. Chaguan asked mosque guards, staff and men who appeared to wield authority, though they declined to identify themselves, to explain why he could see many Uyghurs eating during Ramadan. They can choose to fast or not, came the unvarying reply, because “our government guarantees religious freedom.” The very question annoyed a security guard in a former mosque. When people’s bellies are empty they will eat, he scoffed.

For years the government in Xinjiang wheeled out party-approved imams to proclaim Xinjiang a place of religious freedoms “unparalleled in any past historical period”. Diplomats, politicians and journalists from friendly countries were invited on choreographed tours to declare China a respecter of Islam. After praying at the Baida mosque in 2021, Iran’s then-ambassador to China declared Xinjiang Muslims free to practise their faith, adding his praise for “soft and clean” mosque carpets. Now the preferred line is that Xinjiang is converging with the Chinese mainstream. In March the region’s party secretary, Ma Xingrui, called the “Sinicisation of Islam” in Xinjiang a necessary and “inevitable trend”.

To be clear, for all the boasts about choice, options for the pious are narrowing. Independent reporting in Xinjiang carries constant risks of harming Uyghurs. Plain-clothes agents followed Chaguan on foot and by car during his visit. Still, on four occasions it was possible to ask Uyghurs (including a police officer) whether Ramadan fasts were allowed this year, without being overheard. Their replies were almost identical. “Bu hao shuo,” they said, or “Bu gan shuo,” meaning that it is difficult to say or they dared not say. Asked if fasting is banned, one silently nodded.

A short train ride from Urumqi lies Turpan, a mostly Uyghur oasis town known for its vineyards. A few years ago many Turpan residents would celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the festival that marks Ramadan’s end, at an ancient adobe-brick mosque in the shadow of the Sugong Tower, a lovely 18th-century minaret. Now that mosque is a museum. Implausibly, museum staff insist that this reflects local wishes. An older Han Chinese man in the security control room growled that when people wanted to use this mosque, they did. Now they do not want to come, so do not. The imam was old and died, he went on, and people have mosques nearer their homes.

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An atheist party declares itself an arbiter of faith

Locals might disagree—if they could speak freely. A tree-lined lane called Jiefang Lu (Liberation Road) leads from the Sugong Tower to central Turpan. Halfway down, the Kangka Mosque, a modern building decorated with floral paintings, is padlocked. Farther along, the Guanxiang Mosque has lost the tops to its minarets. Next door, the Youlewu Mosque has been part-demolished. Bizarrely, its surviving gateway is entombed in cement panels. Its tiled columns can be glimpsed where the panels have crumbled.

Forced secularisation does not stop there. Many houses on Jiefang Lu have colourful tiled pictures of landscapes over their entrance gates. Several are defaced with blotches of spray paint or cement. In each case the image being concealed is of a mosque.

In Turpan there was a palpable sadness to Eid al-Fitr, which fell on April 10th this year. In the cool, smoke-scented darkness before dawn, several dozen mostly old men walked to Eid prayers at the Dongda Mosque (the young may not attend services). Afterwards they stood in silent rows to watch China’s flag being raised in the mosque garden, as a gaggle of officials sang the national anthem. An amplified voice barked, in Mandarin, that “patriotism is the duty of every citizen”, before announcing “follow-up meetings and activities”. In surrounding streets, there were none of the happy crowds seen in other Muslim countries. China’s rulers say that they are bringing order and progress to Xinjiang. They call this true religious freedom. Believers are paying a price. ■

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This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Ramadan in Xinjiang”

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China

April 13th 2024

• →China’s high-stakes struggle to defy demographic disaster
• →Will China’s ties with Israel survive the Gaza war?
• →What Ramadan is like in Xinjiang

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From the April 13th 2024 edition

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Panama symbolises the Sino-American struggle for influence

The superpowers use soft and hard power

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Tensions with the West are fuelling China’s anxiety about food supplies

Grain pains are growing

Hail China’s new “ice-and-snow economy”

The country is betting on winter sports and tourism to boost growth in its rustbelt

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Источник: www.economist.com