It's not so much that they're Muslim, but that they're Uighar, concentrated in one region, and calling for independence much like Tibetans. The Hui are also a majority-Muslim ethnicity within China, but their faith is accepted and even growing, because they're less geographically concentrated and seem to be fine being part of China [1].
Note that's not to excuse the terrible treatment of the Uighars, but to illustrate that it's not just about their religion.
There’s another large Muslim minority group called the Hui, who aren’t included in the Xinjiang camps and are generally treated well by most accounts I’ve seen.
Most Chinese Muslims are not Uyghur. The Chinese government doesn't care about its citizens being Muslim per se. The issues are actually quite different - separatism and a string terrorist attacks that caused a government crackdown.
Yeah. In fact, the CCP has been pro-Hui Muslim to an extent that the Han majority fear the country will be Islamicized some day.
The ordinary people's resentment towards Muslim stems from the Hui's abuse of political privileges to expand their religious strengths, such as Saria Law, to intervene Han people's daily life everywhere, from Ningxia, Gansu to Henan and Shandong, from Canteens, Schools to Police, Courts.
In the meanwhile, the majority has little to zero knowledge about the Uyghurs because only a few Uyghur people live outside Xinjiang.
The situation is really weird and there is a conspiracy theory saying that the CCP leadership has been controlled by the Hui Muslim.
BTW, the Hui Muslim and the Uyghur Muslim have been enemies since the Qing Dynasty.
Uighurs are not persecuted "because they are Muslim". Hui, the second largest Chinese ethnic group after Han, are Muslim too. And they are not persecuted in any way.
Uighurs are persecuted for the same reason the CCP tries to destroy the Tibetan ethnic group.
Both these groups have strong independence movements that want to break away from China.
Muslim minority (but majority in Xinjiang, more or less resisting forced assimilation). Regular Han people don't really have much sympathy for them, and since China is nowadays an ethnostate, the state won't care either.
They would not currently attempt to do this in Han cities.
There is one issue with Uighur people in your statement that if you dig into history, Han Chinese have been living in Xinjiang much longer than the Uighurs. In fact, Chinese people have been in Xinjiang even before the Han dynasty, and incorporated some Buddhism-worshiping minority groups and formed the so-called Han Chinese. You can still see the splendid ancient Buddhism relics in Xinjiang. Uighurs, a Muslim minority, entered the region several centuries later, mainly after the Yuan dyansty. To compare with, there is another Muslim minority, Hui, descending from the Central Asia and Middle East (Persian) immigrants during Tang Dynasty. So if people argue that “ancestral land”, they really need to see that in good ol’ Asia, history is such a bitch that one can easily get lost. But that thousands of years old bitch still haunts you in the night.
Is anyone saying that they are? All coverage refers to them similarly to this article - they are a Muslim ethnoreligious minority.
The parallels to Muslim minority integration in the West is probably why it is so interesting to Westerners. The disparate treatment by governments is what makes it so striking - in China they are second class citizens; in the West they are favoured over the indigenous population.
that this is an extreme oversimplification of the Xinjiang issue should be obvious given the fact that other Muslim Chinese minorities like the Hui in China enjoy relative religious freedom. (in fact the issue is assimilation into China's ruling class, not religion per se). In fact inter-Muslim wars in China itself have a long history between different Islamic groups. Also of course the (lack of) response from the Muslim world in general to the Uyghur situation should make clear that the situation is somewhat more complicated.
The Hui are definitely suffering, in the public mind, from conceptual association with the Uyghurs. As long as the Uyghurs claim to represent "Islam", it's somewhat unavoidable for the Hui to be dragged down with them.
Nevertheless, it is quite plainly the case that oppression of the Uyghurs targets them for being culturally distinct (and, to a certain extent, seditious), not for being Muslims. It baffles me that Western media are so monomaniacally focused on criticizing this in terms of "oppressing people because of their religion" when (1) that is obviously not what's going on, and (2) "oppressing people because of their race", which is going on, is at least as bad in the eyes of Western media consumers as "oppressing people because of their religion" is.
Every time this happens, it signals as loudly as possible that the reporter has absolutely no clue what they're purporting to talk about. And it is fascinating that it seems to be so important to so many of them to talk about it anyway.
> But then, China has an awful lot of other misleading advertising and false claims (in particular around TCM and efficacy of folk remedies) that the government ignores or promotes. Why only target halal?
Well, from the article:
>> The Ningxia government has taken measures against the pan-halal tendency and Islamic thought influenced by theologies common in Arab nations, which is referred to as Arabization.
>> The Ningxia Ethnic Affairs Commission vowed in May 2017 to properly handle the pan-halal and Arabization tendencies, promoting socialist core values and placing national flags at religious sites, read a statement on the website of the Ningxia government.
I feel pretty sure that what they really care about is the Arabization. The two aren't totally unrelated; a marketplace that bifurcates everything into "halal haircuts" and "haram haircuts", "halal art lessons" and "haram art lessons" is providing space for (or, depending on your point of view, expressing) the idea that what's most important is to be a Muslim first and Chinese second.
They're not specifically targeting muslims, at least for now. For example, Hui muslims, another Chinese minority, aren't persecuted. It's more to do with the Uighur ethnicity.
The headline is slightly misleading. It's not all muslim minorities in China: it's muslims living in the separatist Xinjiang region, who are ethnically Turkic. There are a non-insignificant number of muslims outside of Xinjiang, such as the Huizu, which are essentially Han Chinese muslims. Lots of the "terrorism" originating from Xinjiang has separatist rather than just religious motivations; I wouldn't be surprised if this is why the Chinese government is so keen to crack down.
*Edit: the headline was originally 'China forces its Muslim minority to install spyware on their phones'
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