Steadily growing over the past few years, the Chinese government’s Sinicization campaigns have targeted a number of Muslim minority groups. These campaigns are perhaps most visible through the transformation of mosques, which have been the site of confrontation between police and local protesters. Several recent media pieces shine light on this dynamic in Hui communities and describe how their Muslim identities have changed over time. This week, Hannah Theaker and David Stroup published a 91-page report titled “Making Islam Chinese: Religious Policy and Mosque Sinicisation in the Xi Era.” The report details how Sinicization policies have suppressed the religious activity and identity of Hui communities since 2017, including mosques with Arabic features:
This report provides detailed analysis of key policy documents undergirding Sinicisation policy to reveal the framework, ambitions and proposed measures of Sinicisation policy. The General Office of the State Council’s “Opinions on Suggestions for Strengthening and Improving Islamic Work Under the New Situation”, more commonly known as Document No. 10 of the Xinjiang Papers, and the China Islamic Association’s (2018) “Five Year Plan for Maintaining Progress Toward the Sinicisation of Islam in Our Nation (2018-2022)” together provide a blueprint for radical transformation of Islamic communities and social organisation, alongside further measures for reducing the numbers of mosques and additional surveillance of Muslim migrants within China. The rhetoric of this campaign established clear norms of appropriateness for Islamic religious belief and practice in accordance with standards set by the party-state.
[…] The party-state applies significant pressure to Islamic communities to ensure compliance with Sinicisation policy. These measures have included targeted arrests of key individuals, including imams, dissidents and mosque management committee members, interventions into mosque management committees and imam selection processes, ‘study visits’ for key local religious professionals and officials, and Public Security Bureau (PSB) deployment around forced mosque renovations considered to be of high sensitivity. Other coercive tactics have included leverage of health and safety regulations and other bureaucratic processes to enforce closures, and outright threats of demolition made against targeted mosques and religious institutions. Such processes of quiet coercion have similarly served to dilute public opposition and obscure the true impact of Sinicisation measures.
[…] We estimate that all mosques with ‘Arabic’ features have either been subject to architectural Sinicisation or will be targeted in further policy cycles. [Source]
This theme was also discussed on a recent episode of the Remote Chay Podcast, published last week, titled “Studying Mosque Destructions in China From Afar.” The podcast is part of a project called Remote Ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In the episode, Ruslan Yusupov, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, described the process and historical references that underlie de-Arabization and Sinicization of mosques in China, focusing on Hui communities:
There are several stages to this campaign. The interplay between various forces and the way the campaign takes hold on the ground is varied. Most of the time, the government targets what it sees as obvious signs of Saudization and Arabization of Islamic architecture. Those are minarets that are thin, and they have finials, which are usually crescent moons, and then also all sorts of different round-shaped domes. So those are typically targeted. And if you look at the [classified government] report [on mosque rectification] from Xining, which includes lots of different pictures, you will see that, at first, when the on-the-ground grassroots remodification committee proposed those changes in the design, none of them included any pagodas or pavilions on top of mosques. […] They provided before- and after-photos. What you see them imagining sinicization to be like is that it’s actually shapeless, because it can’t escape its Arab style reference. So [in] the after-pictures of mosques, which are doctored, obviously, photoshopped in order to visualize sinicization, these mosques have nothing. They have just flat roofs. Nothing replaces minarets and domes.
Then, when actual demolitions took place, you see that so-called elements of Chinese culture [were] added, not only Sinicizing [by] just maiming the mosques, but [also] replacing the Arab structures with Sinicized structures. That itself is very interesting because the dominant way this is imagined is that the reference is taken from […] the architecture of Ming-era mosques that have really elaborate structures. The Niujie mosque in Beijing, for instance, is a good example of that. But the reference to history is misleading, because many Ming era mosques did not survive the destructive forces of 20th century China, even if they had a Sinicized look. So that is also very interesting, the way […] a particular version, rather diluted version of history, is used to justify why these mosques have to […] have these pagodas and pavilions if they are allowed to remain in China. [Source]
While these Sinicization campaigns have remodeled mosques without the full consent of many communities, few Western commentators have acknowledged the relatively recent origin of the ostensibly non-Chinese, Arabic style of some mosques targeted in these campaigns. Indeed, Mohammed Turki A Al-Sudairi has written about how “imaginaries of Saudi culture—in terms of mosque architectural styles […]—had become far more common within Hui cultural contexts” during the 1980s and 1990s due to an influx of funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Writing about Chinese madrasas’ links to Islamic schools abroad, Jackie Armijo has also written that “mosques dating back to the Ming and Qing periods [such as Kunming’s South City Mosque] have been torn down and replaced with what can best be described as ‘neo-pseudo-Middle Eastern’ style mosques. […] In at least some instances, students returning from their studies overseas played a role in the community’s decision to tear down and rebuild a mosque.”
In order to justify its Sinicization policies, the Chinese government has often invoked the threat of “foreign forces” that allegedly compel Chinese ethnic minorities to convert to Islam and push them towards the “three evils” of ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and violent terrorism. These claims are largely overblown and inflated with propaganda, and they have led to severe human rights abuses for even the most banal forms of religious observance. At the same time, Chinese Muslims’ historical resistance against government repression has been anchored in certain prominent mosques that they call “Little Meccas” (alluding to Islam’s holiest city, located in Saudi Arabia). Jianping Wang published an article in the Journal of Contemporary East Asian Studies last week on this subject:
[Chinese Muslims] needed strong community structures of their own to counter and resist the injustices and discrimination that might come from the totalitarian imperial polity. For [the] purpose of competition and safeguarding communal autonomy, particularly with respect to maintaining normal religious life and upholding cultural customs, the Chinese Muslims constructed Little Meccas as regional religious centers that brought together their dispersed enclaves for the purposes of survival.
[…] In the People’s Republic, Shadian Mosque was led by Ma Bohua, a Hui young teacher, to resist the People’s Liberation Army in their struggle against religious persecution and repression during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Even in contemporary China, many big mosques became centers of resistance against the Anti-three tides in the Campaign of Sinicization of Islam. In these movements, the governments wanted to change the Arabic architectural style of the mosques into a Chinese one. However, they were blocked from doing so by the Muslims in Weizhou in Ningxia, Xining in Qinghai and Zhaotong and many other places including Najiaying and Daying in Yunnan. All these locations have large mosques led by famous clerics, have well-developed Madrasas, and are regarded as regional centers of Islam who have had a history of resistance to the imperial forces.
[…] Little Meccas can be considered a method used by Muslims at the grass-root level or as a historical solution aimed at protecting Chinese Muslims from being assimilated into the Han Chinese cultural environment, and shielding them from the arbitrary politics of the imperial government. [Source]
The struggle for Hui Chinese religious freedom can be observed through other angles, as well. With a gendered lens, the Oxford China Centre’s newsletter last month highlighted a new book by Maria Jaschok titled, “Inside the Expressive Culture of Chinese Women’s Mosques,” which describes “the history and significance of current contestations over the increasing prominence of expressive piety in Hui Muslim women’s mosques in central China.” With an international lens, The New York Times published an article in December on the emigration to the U.S. of Hui Muslims fleeing persecution in China. And with an advocacy lens, former U.S. State Department advisor Todd Stein highlighted Congress’ selective outrage at the destruction of mosques in China and those in Gaza, arguing that this undermines U.S. criticism of the former.
