TheEconomistSeptember 28th 2019 391A
s darkness begins to settle on
Duanjiaping village, a few men in
white skullcaps head towards a large
mosque. It is time for the Maghrib, the
fourth of the five daily prayers of devout
Muslims. It is clear even before they reach
the building’s high yellow walls that all is
not right. The prayer-hall’s four minarets,
topped by golden crescent moons, are still
a towering landmark. But they are covered
in scaffolding and green netting and they
are not due for repair.
It is less than six years since hundreds
of Muslim men gathered in the mosque’s
courtyard to celebrate the completion of its
new Arab-style prayer hall. It had cost 9.8m
yuan ($1.37m)—a tidy sum in a county that
is officially classified as impoverished. The
festivities had official blessing. The imam
of one of the most important mosques in
Lanzhou, the provincial capital, was there.
So, too, was a senior leader of the govern-
ment-backed Islamic Association of China.
Much has changed. A chill political
wind has been blowing over Duanjiaping
and hundreds of other villages and towns
in Linxia, a majority-Muslim prefecture in
Gansu province, which borders on the Ti-
betan plateau and the far-western region of
Xinjiang. Many villages in Linxia have at
least one mosque, with minarets visible far
and wide. The one with the scaffolding in
Duanjiaping can accommodate 3,000 wor-
shippers. Its grandeur is not unusual. In re-
cent decades rural communities in Lin-
xia—China’s “little Mecca”, as it is often
called—have vied to outdo each other in
mosque-building. Now the government is
not only reining them in, it is tightening
controls on their faith as well.
The horrors of China’s campaign
against Islam in Xinjiang are well known.
About two years ago reports began to
emerge of the building of a vast gulag there.
Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurshave been thrown into it—many simply for
seeming too pious. There are about 10m Ui-
ghurs in China. But they form only about
half of the country’s Muslim population.
Linxia is home to more than 1.1m Muslims,
mainly belonging to two ethnic groups: the
Hui and the Dongxiang. There are Muslim
communities scattered widely across the
rest of China (see map, next page). Most are
made up of Huis. Because of Xinjiang’s his-
tory of separatism and terrorism, Uighurs
are suffering by far the harshest clamp-
down experienced by any of these Muslim
groups. Outside Xinjiang, however, other
believers are starting to feel the effects, too.
The government’s attitude towards
Muslims in the interior began to change in
2016 after China’s leader, Xi Jinping, set out
plans for the “sinicisation” of the country’s
religions. Christianity and Islam, having
strong overseas connections, became the
main targets. Officials set out to purge
them of foreign influences deemed threat-
ening to the Communist Party. In the case
of Islam the aim was partly to prevent the
spread of radicalism and with it, terrorism.
Among Muslims elsewhere in China,
however, there have been no reports of ter-
rorist links. The Huis were once China’s
model Muslims, quite unlike the Uighurs
in Xinjiang who have chafed at Chinese
rule for decades. A few Uighurs have occa-
sionally used violence to vent their griev-
ances. The Huis have no separatist ambi-
tions. They claim descendancy from ArabSinicising Islam
Out with the Arab-style
DUANJIAPING
China’s repression of Islam is spreading from Xinjiang to other Muslim areas
China
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