EPILOGUE
ETHNIC POLITICS DURING THE “PEOPLE’S WAR ON TERROR”
The observations discussed in the preceding chapters reflect the nature of China’s governance of ethnic politics in Hui communities during the period of my field observations, between June 2014 and July 2016. The years following my departure saw sweeping changes in the tone, substance, and intended goals of ethnicity policies enacted in Islamic communities throughout China. The dramatic shifts that accompanied the declaration of Xi Jinping’s “People’s War on Terror” (Renmin Fankong Zhanzheng) demand some additional reflection.
Recent demonstrations of force by the state in exerting control over ethnic identification illustrate the precariousness of the CCP’s position. While the police measures implemented by the state within Muslim communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region following the 2009 outbreak of ethnic violence in Ürümchi already greatly restricted ethnic and religious expression, new procedures taken in subsequent years increased state surveillance and repression. Following the March 2014 attack on the main train station in Kunming by eight Uyghurs, Xi’s administration revived the Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism (Yanlidaji Baolikongbu Huodong Zhuanxiang Xingdong) and shortly thereafter declared the People’s War on Terror in Xinjiang. Though relations between Hui communities and the state do not evidence the same level of conflict and tension as that of their Uyghur counterparts, a growing number of policies restricts expression of Hui identity. While the internal contestation within the Hui community allowed the regime to successfully mitigate the potential for Hui resistance, the years following the opening of the Strike Hard Campaign saw the state adopt a much more aggressive posture regarding all expressions of Muslim identity, including those made by the Hui.
The CCP enacted the most severe measures in Xinjiang. Retrospectively, the roots of the current program of repression date back as early as 2014, when the Party began to restrict the movement of migrant Uyghurs within Xinjiang. In 2015, alongside prohibitions on fasting during Ramadan and the wearing of religious garments, officials moved into Uyghur homes to monitor their hosts for behaviors deemed “extremist” in a program named fanghuiju (visit [the people], benefit [the people], and gather [the hearts of the people]). Officially, extremist behaviors included owning a Qur’an, engaging in regular prayer, and abstaining from alcohol consumption.1 The appointment of Chen Quanguo as the region’s Party secretary in 2016 intensified the severity of the campaign. Chen, who had earned a reputation for bringing order to minority regions during his tenure as Party secretary of Tibet, from 2011 to 2016, imported many of the same heavy-handed tactics to Xinjiang, dramatically increasing the size of the police force and building a security apparatus.2 Between 2015 and 2017 the Party constructed extensive, sophisticated networks for surveillance of predominantly Muslim communities. These measures included the erection of numerous “convenience police stations” and security checkpoints, the installation of cameras equipped with facial recognition software, and the collection of biometric data.3 Throughout this period the CCP also enacted a systematic removal of Arabic and Uyghur language from public signs and demolished community mosques and Uyghur graveyards.4
Most dramatically, in 2017 the state began the extralegal detention of Muslims it deemed potential extremists—predominantly Uyghurs and Kazakhs—in concentration camps.5 By late 2019, the estimated number of detainees ranged between 800,000 and 2 million.6 In early 2020, the leak of CCP internal documents referred to as the “Karakax List” revealed that reasons for being labeled “untrustworthy” and summarily detained included visiting abroad, getting a passport, visiting foreign websites, praying, having a long beard, or even having detained relatives.7
The crackdown on Islamic communities extends well beyond Xinjiang. The CCP began to export the tactics used there to Islamic communities throughout the country.8 Within a year of my departure in July 2016, Hui enclaves throughout China began to experience crackdowns on ethnic and religious expression. The CCP intensified its scrutiny of Muslims, and the Party’s greater restrictions on religious and cultural expression in Islamic communities across China came into clearer focus.9
In the early spring of 2018, the government of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region quietly implemented a de-Islamification campaign, removing Arabic from signs on restaurants and shops and mandating that mosques remove “Arabic-style” features like onion domes.10 In a March 2018 editorial, the Global Times, the regime’s major English-language newspaper, heralded the changes as necessary to combat the slow trickle of potentially corrosive extremism into the lives of ordinary citizens of Ningxia. The editor contended that “pan-halal tendencies appeared in some fields and religion starts to interfere with residents’ social life” (sic), necessitating vigilance and dedication in response.11 A few months later, in August, as Party officials in Xinjiang likened practicing the Islamic faith to being afflicted by a mental illness, protestors in tiny, rural Weizhou Township in Ningxia’s Tongxin County met attempts by the governments to demolish the newly constructed Grand Mosque by occupying the mosque courtyard and forcing a stalemate.12
In autumn, the government of Linxia Hui Autonomous County in Gansu rolled out a series of policies aimed at “strengthening and improving Islamic Work under new circumstances.” An official release announcing the changes echoed the usual boilerplate language of the CCP regarding ethnic politics, including emphasis on improving “national unity, religious harmony, and social stability.” However, the document also compels the local government to “find weak links” and encourage the Islamic community to “follow the path of Sinicization, and resolutely prevent the ‘Saudi-fication’ or ‘Arabization’ of Islam.” The policies ban pilgrimages or other religious activities for officials of the government, ban “high-pitched loudspeakers” in mosques that would “disturb the people” with religious activities, and beseeches the people of Linxia to step up their vigilance in daily surveillance.13
In early December, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region announced that it would send representatives from its police forces to Xinjiang to study and learn from the security and “counter-terrorism” policies enacted by the region as part of the Strike Hard Campaign.14 Later that month, police in Yunnan demolished three mosques in Weishan Yi and Hui Autonomous County, near the city of Dali. Authorities claimed these sites constituted “illegal religious structures” despite members of the mosque community claiming that they had sought to officially register for over a decade.15
Communities outside Hui autonomous areas also felt the imposition of restrictions. As the campaign of Sinicization expanded in 2018 and 2019, local Party officials in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan, stripped domes and Arabic script from mosques and required imams to undergo mandatory ideology training.16 By the middle of 2018, the Sinicization campaign had reached Jinan, where its simultaneous enactment alongside dramatic urban renewal drastically reshaped the Hui Quarter. As part of citywide “beautification” efforts, the city banned many of the neighborhood’s outdoor barbecue restaurants and demolished a number of structures in a road-widening project. At the same time, my respondents in the city reported, the local government demanded that remaining restaurants remove Arabic script and Islamic iconography from their signs. Across the street from the Great Southern Mosque, one respondent told me, the local government razed the famous Yunting Restaurant—built with golden domes to resemble a mosque—as part of the campaign. Even the Great Southern Mosque received orders in late 2019 to strip away the green calligraphic Arabic script that adorned its entrance gate.17
Throughout the country, local governments enacted similar tactics in pursuit of Sinicization. When the city of Beijing announced plans to strip Arabic script from public signs on restaurants and shops in July 2019, the city’s Committee on Ethnicity and Religious Affairs stated that the actions came as part of a “national directive.”18 Remarks from Party officials included in a batch of leaked documents from Xinjiang that surfaced in late 2019 evince the CCP’s fear of Islam that drives the campaign. Speeches given by prominent officials, including Xi Jinping himself, called for strident actions to curb the expression of Islam—ostensibly to combat terrorism.19 Among the many speeches and remarks prepared by various levels of the national and Xinjiang governments, the leaks contained remarks from Xi that conflated Islamic extremism with a “virus-like contagion” (bingdu chuanbo de chuanranbing) that would require a “period of painful, interventionary treatment” (ganyu zhiliao zhentongqi).20 Though such extreme “interventions” by the CCP primarily impacted the Turkic-speaking Uyghur and Kazakh communities, reports emerging in early 2020 revealed that detentions in Xinjiang ensnared a number of Hui as well.21
Such aggressive measures and the rhetoric of the People’s War on Terror echo in popular sentiment toward Islam. As the Party pursued policies of de-Islamification, an emboldened wave of popular Islamophobia swept across the Chinese internet.22 Hui citizens reported being harassed in online forums and social media, where they were frequently accused of being terrorists or subjected to harsh stereotyping.23 In 2017, the announcement from the popular food delivery service, Meituan, that their app would offer a halal delivery option, which would place halal food in separate delivery boxes, earned the company a flood of angry online responses.24
These events suggest a clear shift in the CCP’s ethnic policies, with the Party moving away from the implementation of policies that achieved the unobservable channeling of contentious politics into safe spaces, opting instead for more forceful, direct, and observable forms of suppression. Since the ascension of Xi to the top leadership post in the Party in 2012–13, the CCP has shifted its posture on dealing with minorities—especially Islamic minorities and those resistant to integration—toward an unmistakable preference for derecognition of minority status and assimilation. Calls for a fundamental restructuring of the minzu system began as early as 2004, when the Hui scholar Ma Rong claimed that the Party needed to end policies that gave special recognition to minorities, citing it as the reason a Chinese national consciousness had failed to cohere in minority areas. In a 2008 assessment of the system, Ma critiqued the current system and concluded that differentiation and classification of minzu “creates institutional barriers for the interaction and integration” and thus perpetuates disunity, resentment, and instability. The system of differentiation, he argued, placed equality for groups rather than individuals as its top priority, and thus would “inevitably politicize and institutionalize these groups and strengthen their group consciousness.”25
Other public intellectuals followed Ma, including the policy scholar Hu Angang and the counterterrorism expert Hu Lianhe. Outlining a statist vision of integration, the pair stressed policies that placed the interests of the state before autonomy.26 In a series of articles the two wrote together they maintained that China’s minzu policies left it vulnerable to unfair and hypocritical criticism from “Western countries.” Excoriating these states in a 2011 article, the pair contended that “Western states” relished using nationality questions and invocations such as “human rights” and “national selfdetermination” to break apart socialist countries. The authors therefore dismissed concerns about minority rights as “detrimental external international pressures.” They also echoed Ma’s assertions that China’s minzu policies left it vulnerable to instability, and they called for a “second generation of minzu policies” (di’erdai minzu zhengce) to “encourage the blending together of all minzu” and to “construct stronger cohesion, where you are in me and I in you, and there is not distinction between you and me—an inseparable, prospering community of Zhonghua minzu.”27 Elaborating, the pair implored, “We must be adept and persevere in handling the issues of domestic ethnic groups (minzu) as social issues according to the law, and prevent specially treating the issues of ethnic groups (minzu) as political issues, for the sake of strengthening every citizen’s Zhonghua minzu yishi [Chinese national consciousness] and awareness of the rule of law, removing all fertile ground and exploitable cracks [turang he kecheng zhi xi] where regional nationalisms [difang minzu zhuyi] may grow, strengthen Zhonghua minzu yishi, and dilute the sense of belonging to classified communities of Han and other shaoshu minzu [ethnic minorities].”28
Xi’s ascension to the Party’s leadership in 2013 elevated the position of advocates for a second generation, including Hu Lianhe. Party leadership began to show increased concern for ethnic unrest as a catalyst for China’s collapse, often citing the breakup of the Soviet Union as a cautionary tale.29 State propaganda began to securitize ethnic and religious expression out of line with the state’s narratives and emphasized the struggle against the socalled Three Forces (Sangu Shili) of terrorism, separatism, and extremism as “a zero-sum political struggle of life or death.”30 Xi himself began to express more explicitly assimilationist sentiments. In 2014, in the wake of the Kunming attack, Xi maintained that in response to “separatists” trying to “sabotage our ethnic unity,” Chinese citizens needed to increase exchange and interactions. Citizens must “draw close like the seeds of a pomegranate that stick together,” Xi contended.31 The goal of this interaction, however, was to integrate all minzu into a singular notion of Chineseness rooted in “traditional culture.” Xi’s 2017 address to the CCP Party Congress illustrates this vision of unity. Speaking to the assembled cadres, Xi reminded them of the influence of China’s traditional culture on the Party’s own development: “Socialist culture with Chinese characteristics is derived from China’s fine traditional culture, which was born of the Chinese civilization and nurtured over more than 5,000 years; it has grown out of the revolutionary and advanced socialist culture that developed over the course of the Chinese people’s revolution, construction, and reform under the Party’s leadership.”32
Xi also stressed the importance of developing “cultural confidence” and called for measures to “promote the creative evolution and development of fine traditional Chinese culture” and ensure that religions in China be “Chinese in orientation.”33 By 2019, language stressing the importance of the “collective consciousness of the Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu gongtongti yishi) began appearing more frequently in Xi’s speeches. The imperatives that he issued in these remarks over the course of his leadership closely mirror the recommendations of the policymakers tied to the United Front Work Development (Zhongong Zhongyang Tongyi Zhanxian Gongzuobu; UFWD), one of the country’s staunchest advocacy groups calling for a revision of minzu policy.34
Throughout his leadership, Xi has reinforced such rhetoric with concrete policy measures. Reversing the trend toward a diminished role in ethnic politics for the UFWD in the post-Deng period, Xi oversaw the process of the UFWD’s increasing oversight and tightening the reins of control over management of ethnic politics by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (Guojia Minzu Shiwu Weiyuan Hui; SEAC). This restructuring culminated in March 2018, when the regime announced that the UFWD would assume control over the State Administration for Religious Affairs, giving it broad powers to regulate ethnic and religious behavior.35 Coupled with the expansion of the UFWD through the creation of township-level branches, such a rearrangement of oversight signaled the group’s ascension to a leadership position in the conduct of ethnic politics.36 The primacy of the authority of the UFWD branches at a local level enabled them to become “laboratories of securitization and anti-terrorism work,” especially in locations such as Xinjiang, where the group stands on the front line of the Party’s efforts to implement more assertive measures of control over ethnic politics.37 As a result, the Party’s practice of ethnic politics in many areas now focuses on assimilation (ronghe) and unity (yiti) rather than the pluralism formerly pursued by the SEAC. Such emphasis on integrationist practices can be seen in the appointment of the leading advocate for a second generation of ethnic policies, Hu Lianhe, to a supervisory role over the newly created Xinjiang Bureau of the UFWD.38
While the regime’s tightening of regulation of ethnic identity for Muslims illustrates an overall rise in stature of pro-assimilation policymakers, the persistence of preferential policies and minority-language instruction for some minzu belies the piecemeal implementation of “second-generation” measures. For example, the continued observance of preferential policies in matters of schooling and employment in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin is evidence that second-generation integrationist policies remain far from universal.39 Likewise, the persistence of Yi-Han education systems in Liagnshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan illustrates the CCP’s willingness to allow bilingual and minority-language-based education to continue in certain communities. Indeed, rather than demonstrating drastic changes in minority education policy, the decline of Yi-language education in Liangshan reflects local dissatisfaction with the system’s ability to adapt with the times to provide functional Yi-language literacy.40 In both cases, preferential policies for shaoshu minzu persist in minority autonomous communities, with both governmental and popular support.
However, the aggressive posture taken by the state in regard to Islamic minzu suggests the beginnings of a more comprehensive shift in policy, starting in communities deemed potentially threatening to state interests. In these communities, “the phantom of instability” (buwending huanxiang) begets a “perpetual cycle” (guaiquan) of crackdowns and resistance.41 In this way, Leibold reasons, “the mere perception of instability generates intensive surveillance and securitization which in turn generates more instability.”42
By prohibiting religious expression—for instance, by banning beards and Islamic head coverings, restricting the use of written Arabic in public spaces, limiting options for qingzhen diet in public institutions, and declaring certain rhetoric or kinds of religious observances illegal—the CCP risks arousing the enmity of segments of the Hui community. Campaigns like these also illustrate the failure of the CCP to deliver on the guarantees of minzu tuanjie (ethnic unity) and provide minorities with a shared stake in the state that forms the rhetorical core of its ethnic minority policies.43 A deterioration of the regime’s credibility as a good steward of ethnic relations and the perception that it cannot deliver the stable interethnic relations it promises also erode vital pillars of the regime’s legitimating narrative.
FIGURE E.1. Screenshots of harassment of the CCP secretary of Wuhan, Ma Guoqiang, who is Hui, posted to Weibo at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, January 2020.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic potentially represents the kind of “social earthquake” that could reshape the dynamics of China’s ethnic politics.44 During moments of disruption, social identities crystallize and distinctions between self and other heighten. When disruption overturns other sources of normality—such as work or recreation—people often seek ontological security in the relatively safe harbors of national or ethnic identities. In attempts to restore what they perceive as normality, individuals may exclude others they consider “outside” the community and whose presence serves as a reminder of the disruptive forces that overturn the usual conduct of life. Members of marginalized groups may find themselves excluded from solidarity in the face of unsettled times, or perhaps even scapegoated for the disruptions.45
Netizen harassment of the Hui official Ma Guoqiang on the social media platform Weibo during the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in January 2020 best exemplifies this kind of othering. Ma, then acting as Wuhan’s Party secretary, came under intense public scrutiny for his role in mishandling the initial outbreak, which contributed to the spread of the virus. In a January 27 press conference, as city officials admitted that their early mistakes worsened the spread, posters to Weibo excoriated Ma on the basis of his Hui identity. Some hurled slurs, using the homophone Huihui (回蛔, “Hui parasite”) to other him based on his ethnic identity. Others spread the unfounded rumor that Ma’s subsidization of mosques for his Hui co-ethnics left the city financially unprepared to handle the disaster (see figure E.1).46 In directing such vitriol at Ma based on his ethnicity, citizens painted him as suspect and excluded him from the solidarity afforded those affected by the disease. Ma’s harassment mirrors rising concerns about online harassment of Hui and other Muslims on China’s most prominent social media sites.47
The online Islamophobic harassment of Ma illustrates the precariousness of the CCP’s control over ethnic resentments. The regime’s adoption of policies of Sinicization alter the dynamics on which the foundation of regime control rests. In securitizing Islamic and Hui identity the CCP may end up triggering precisely the kind of activation and mobilization it long sought to defuse. If it continues to crack down on what it considers illegal or extremist ethnic or religious expression, the CCP may revive the salience of the external boundaries that separate the Hui from others and redirect the focus of contentious politics toward the regime itself. While the regime’s willingness to permit internal contestation allows it to, thus far, maintain control and prevent the outbreak of restive, contentious politics, its overzealous urge to root out any heterodox ethnic expression may cause its grasp on ethnic politics to slip away.