China to take special measures for keeping under control Xinjiang’s muslim

Families sundered by a wave of detentions. Mosques barred from broadcasting the call to prayer. And a battery of more intrusive ways to monitor the communications of citizens for possible threats to public security.

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A recent survey across the Xinjiang region in the far west of China revealed a society seething with anger and trepidation as the government, alarmed by a slow-boil insurgency that has claimed hundreds of lives, has introduced unprecedented measures aimed at shaping the behavior and beliefs of China’s 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority that considers this region as an Islamic state.

As heavily armed soldiers rummage through cars and examine ID cards, ethnic Uighur motorists and their passengers are sometimes asked to hand over their cellphones so that the police can search them for content or software deemed a threat to public security.

In addition to jihadist videos, the police are on the lookout for Skype and WhatsApp, apps popular with those who communicate with jihadist cells and especially ISIS linked groups inside and outside China, and for software that allows users to access blocked websites (so called “VPN” apps).

Here in Kashgar, the fabled Silk Road outpost near China’s border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, officials have banned mosques from broadcasting the call to prayer, forcing muezzins to shout out the invocation five times a day from rooftops across the city. The new rule is an addition to longstanding policies that prohibit after-school religious classes and children under 18 from entering mosques. (The installation of video cameras on mosque doorways in recent months makes such rules hard to ignore.)

Southeast of Kashgar, citizens in the city of Hotan seethed over a government decision to outlaw two dozen names considered “too Muslim”, forcing parents to rename their children or be unable to register them for school, according to local residents and the police.

And farther north in Ghulja, an ethnically diverse city near the Kazakh border with a history of tensions, people are fuming about a crackdown prohibiting young men from wearing beards and women from veiling their faces. Those who ignore the rules are sometimes jailed, residents said.

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Schools have largely switched to Mandarin as the main language of instruction instead of Uighur, and the government has begun offering cash and housing subsidies to encourage intermarriage between muslim and other Chinese.

It remains a matter of dispute whether radical Islam has taken hold among many Uighurs, the majority of whom subscribe to a moderate form of Sunni Islam. But the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and the Islamic State’s killing in November of a Chinese hostage in Syria have prompted Beijing to step up efforts to position its battle to pacify Xinjiang as part of the global war on violent religious extremism.

Source article: Xinjiang Seethes Under Chinese Crackdown