Islamophobia In China

China’s repression of the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group based in Xinjiang, has prompted widespread condemnation by the international community in recent years. The Trump and Biden administrations both placed economic sanctions on China for its treatment of the Uyghurs. Congress has been busy, too, passing legislation that bars imports from Xinjiang unless they’re proven to have been made without forced labor. The Asian superpower, for its part, denies any wrongdoing.

Tracing their ancestry to the sixth century C.E., when they migrated to the Mongolian steppes, the Uyghurs are a Turkic people whose language is closest to Uzbek. Islam is the group’s dominant religion; around the 16th century, Uyghur religious leaders founded several Islamic city-states in what was then referred to as East Turkestan. It wasn’t until 1884 that the region was made an official province of China and renamed Xinjiang, which translates to “New Frontier.”

When the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911, several Uyghur leaders led successful attempts to create independent Muslim republics in western China. But with the rise of the Communist Party in 1949, China officially claimed Xinjiang once more.

China has a history of targeting ethnic minorities, including Tibetans and African immigrants. But the Communist Party’s stated reason for taking action against the Uyghurs is the purported threat of terrorism and separatism.

In 2013, China adopted the Belt and Road Initiative, an enormous infrastructure project aimed at connecting East Asia and Europe. In order for the project to be successful, government officials believed, the westernmost province of Xinjiang had to be under tight control.

As part of its plan to curb resistance in the region, China launched the Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism in 2014. The initiative led to an increased amount of surveillance, with roadblocks and checkpoints, confiscation of Uyghurs’ passports, and the introduction of “people’s convenience cards” that restricted Uyghurs’ freedom of movement.

Around the same time, the state began advocating intermarriage between Han Chinese and Uyghur people. This was only the first step in diluting the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Between 2015 and 2018, more than two million new Han residents moved to the province. Authorities began fining Uyghur families with too many children but failed to enforce restrictions on Han families to the same extent. (China rolled back its infamous one-child policy in 2016, upping the limit to two children and, more recently, even three.) Researchers later discovered that the government subjected hundreds of thousands of Turkic Muslim women to forcible intrauterine device (IUD) insertions, sterilizations and abortions. Though Xinjiang is home to just 1.8 percent of China’s population, in 2018, it accounted for 80 percent of all IUD insertions in the country.

In 2017, China began building massive detention centers described by government officials as reeducation camps. The men and women detained in these camps are brought in for seemingly innocuous behavior: praying, attending religious weddings, visiting a mosque. Totaling more than 380 at their peak, the centers have held between one and three million Uyghurs in total, making them the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority since World War II.

Initially, the Chinese government insisted that the facilities were for vocational training. In 2019, officials claimed that all of the camps were being closed down. But satellite images taken in 2020 corroborated reports of their continued existence, contradicting China’s assertion that everyone detained at the camps had “graduated” after successful reeducation. Initially, the Chinese government insisted that the facilities were for vocational training. In 2019, officials claimed that all of the camps were being closed down. But satellite images taken in 2020 corroborated reports of their continued existence, contradicting China’s assertion that everyone detained at the camps had “graduated” after successful reeducation.