Generally, reporting of human rights abuses against Muslims in China focuses on Uyghur Muslims of Turkic origin who live in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in Western China at the crossroads of Central and East Asia.However, very little is known about ethnic Hui Chinese Muslims’ suffering, The Muslim News, UK said in its Editorial on June 30.
Thousands of protesters in a majority Hui Muslim town in Yunnan province clashed with armed police in a rare show of defiance against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). On May 27, cranes arrived to demolish the minarets of the 14th-century Nàjiāyíng Mosque in Nagu town, in China’s southern Yúnnán province, leading residents to gather to protect it.
Nagu is home to 700,000 of the ten million ethnic Hui Chinese Muslims. Many protesters were arrested for disrupting social order as they sat inside the mosque guarding it.
The Nàjiāyíng Mosque in Nagu town has stood since 1370. However, a 2020 court order ruled that the newly constructed domes and minarets were illegal and needed to be demolished.
Yunnan has a history of protests against Beijing’s increasing signs of Sinicisation of religion.
Hundreds of Hui Muslims in the Ningxia area battled the police in 2018 to prevent mosque demolitions. The local government held off on demolition but later replaced the mosque’s domes and minarets with traditional Chinese-style pagodas.
Chinese Muslims continue to suffer in the country, owing mostly to Muslim-majority countries’ shameful complicity in national interests.
From May 30 to June 2, a delegation from the (22-member) Arab League visited Xinjiang, home to the Uyghur concentration camps.
According to China’s Foreign Ministry, “Members of the delegation said that Xinjiang’s society is harmonious, the economy is prosperous, and Muslims freely exercise their ethnic and religious rights in accordance with the law.”
The visit outraged Uyghurs and human rights campaigners, who said the visit showed the CCP’s confidence in its repressive strategy and the readiness of many Muslim nations to support it.
“It’s disappointing to see Muslim leaders from Islamic countries allow China to use them to hide [the] genocide of Turkic Muslims and other minorities,” said Robert McCaw, Government Affairs Department Director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“Every country operates in their [perceived] best interests,” McCaw said. “Right now, Muslim countries are covering for China because they think it’s in their economic interests.”
Western countries show little concern, and when they do, only for geopolitical reasons.
According to a 2020 Australian Strategic Policy Institute study, 83 mostly European, American, and Chinese companies, including household names like Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Amazon, Apple, and BMW, are directly or indirectly benefiting from the use of Uyghur workers outside of Xinjiang through potentially abusive labour transfer programmes.
Muslims living outside of China must lobby their respective parliaments to sanction China until it changes its anti-Muslim policies, The Muslim News concludes.