Cultural Repression
In addition to the ‘re-education’ drive, since becoming Xinjiang Party Secretary in 2016, Chen Quanguo’s tenure has also seen an intensification of systematic cultural and religious repression and erasure. Legislation has heavily restricted Uyghur religious and cultural expression and teaching of the Uyghur language. Further evidence shows the systematic erasure of Uyghur cultural heritage, with religious sites - some over a thousand years old - destroyed and places of worship repurposed or demolished.
Soon after the announcement of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative in September 2013, in which Xinjiang was intended to play a key role, legal restrictions were tightened in the region, with its legislators passing a ban prohibiting residents from wearing burqas, having previously banned fasting by Muslim officials, students and teachers during Ramadan. Amendments to China’s Criminal law saw the legal application and punishments for many terrorist and extremist actions expanding in scope to include educational and social activities, possession of books and audio-visual material, and even clothing.
Despite Uyghur being the official language of the region, education policies have restricted the teaching of the Uyghur language and government job postings require proficiency in Mandarin alone. A June 2018 notice issued by the Xinjiang Education Department proclaimed that by the end of that year, the region’s 2.94 million students in mandatory education were expected to have a fully Chinese-medium language education, and that if at any time a teacher or student uses Uyghur, this must immediately be reported and dealt with as if it were a “serious teaching incident”.
Satellite imagery also shows that approximately 16,000 mosques in Xinjiang, 65% of the total, have been destroyed or damaged as a result of a ‘mosque rectification drive’ in the region since 2017. Of this, an estimated 8,500 have been demolished outright. A further 30% of important Islamic sacred sites (shrines, cemeteries and pilgrimage routes including many protected under Chinese law) have been demolished across Xinjiang mostly since 2017 and an additional 28% have been damaged or altered in some way, with the exception of those located in areas visited by large numbers of tourists, such as Urumqi and Kashgar, in which almost all mosques remain structurally intact. However, media reports suggest that of those remaining intact, a number of mosques have been secularised or converted into commercial or civic spaces, including cafes and public toilets.
A 2020 study of rural Uyghur shrine and cemetery complexes - which have deep spiritual importance to the communities living around them - in Aksu Prefecture found that 85% had had most or all of their graves demolished by 2020, and 58% of cemeteries had had traditional graves replaced with rows of identical clay brick graves, in some cases with identifying names removed and replaced with numbers. Chinese government officials say that they're standardising and civilising public cemeteries in the name of “social stability”.
In addition, many cultural heritage sites have had security checkpoints installed or been fully enclosed by walls, restricting access. Some of the most well-known and culturally significant sites such as Imam Jafar Sadiq Mazar, Imam Asim Mazar and Ordam Mazar that previously hosted major annual pilgrimages have been demolished entirely. For centuries, Ordam Mazar was commemorated as the place from which Islam spread across the region, marking the endpoint of a series of sacred sites in and around the desert. Tens of thousands of people visited the site before the festival was outlawed in 1997 and since then the area has been locked down, before being demolished in 2017. The same month the site was demolished, Rahile Dawut, an international expert on Xinjiang, went missing while trying to travel to Beijing for a conference and her whereabouts remain unknown. She is one of at least 300 Uyghur intellectuals believed to have been detained in Xinjiang since 2017.
Many of those detained or with relatives who have been detained have ascribed it to having had some form of religious association, such as owning a Koran, wearing a headscarf, growing a long beard, having any form of Islamic education or having visited any Islamic holy sites - even if these acts were allowed or even encouraged by the government at the time they took place.