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China is removing religious and cultural references from place names in Xinjiang, rights groups say
Chinese authorities in Xinjiang have systematically changed the names of hundreds of villages in an attempt to erase Uighur culture, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch.
Reportdone in collaboration with Norway-based organization Uyghur Hjelp and published on Wednesday, compared the names of 25,000 Xinjiang villages as listed by China's National Bureau of Statistics between 2009 and 2023.
While most name changes “seem mundane,” about 630 villages in Xinjiang have been renamed to remove references to Islam or Uyghur culture and history, according to the report.
Words like “dutar”, a traditional Uyghur stringed instrument, or “mazar”, a shrine, have been removed from village names and replaced with words such as “happiness”, “unity” and “harmony” general terms that are often found. in the policy documents of the Communist Party.
ABC News has contacted the Chinese embassy in Australia for comment on the report.
Most of the village's name changes occurred between 2017 and 2019, at the height of the government crackdown in Xinjiang, according to the report.
James Leibold, a La Trobe University expert on China's ethnic politics, said the changes were a direct response to Chinese President Xi Jinping's call for the “sinicization” of religions at the 2016 Central Religious Work Conference.
“This prompted CCP officials to 'fix' not only the names of the places highlighted in the HRW report, but also mosques, cemeteries, shrines and other parts of the sacred landscape in the Uyghur homeland and other parts of China,” it said. he.
“This process of cultural erasure was also part of a broader crackdown on religious extremism and perceived terrorism that resulted in the extrajudicial imprisonment of an estimated one million Uyghurs and other minorities in re-education camps across Xinjiang.”
Xinjiang is a vast region bordering Kazakhstan that is home to about 11 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities.
In 2017, the Chinese government launched an assimilation campaign that has included mass detentions, suspected political indoctrination, alleged family separations, and suspected forced labor among other methods.
As part of the crackdown, more than a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities were estimated to be held in illegal internment camps.
The Chinese government at the time described the camps as “vocational training centers” and said they were needed to curb separatism and religious extremism.
The UN Human Rights Office in 2022 found allegations of rights abuses in Xinjiang “credible” and said China may have committed crimes against humanity in the region.
Ramila Chanisheff, president of the Australian Tangritagh Uyghur Women's Association, said renaming the villages was “detrimental” to Uyghurs in China and abroad.
“This is terrible,” she said.
“Their everyday life is being deceived by the Communist Party.
“Many residents in the counties will be old people who probably don't know Chinese at all, they will be completely confused.
“And we will [Uyghur diaspora] do you know where we'll go if we ever get back there?”
Ms Chanisheff called for the Australian and international community to speak out against the “ethnic and cultural cleansing” of the Uyghurs in China.
“We have protested against Australia furthering its ties with China and not bringing human rights abuses to light,” she said.
“This blatant change in the names of streets, shrines and mosques [means] our history is being hidden before our eyes and the world is doing nothing about it.
“Our government is not doing anything about it.”
Attempts to “Erase Uyghur Identity and Culture”
Changes in the names of Xinjiang villages included the removal of references to religion, including terms such as “Hoja”, a title for a Sufi religious teacher, and “haniqa”, a type of Sufi religious building, or terms such as “baxshi” . a shaman.
References to Uyghur history or to regional leaders before the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 have also been removed, according to the report.
Professor Leibold said place names are “important repositories of cultural and historical identity”.
“They help connect people to the landscape, and in the case of the Uyghur homeland, these village names are symbols of Uyghur identity, sovereignty and the KKP. [now broken] the promise to allow Uyghurs and other minority nationalities to be 'masters of their own house',” he said.
Changing the names of the villages reflected the Chinese government's efforts to “erase Uyghur identity, language and culture” and replace them with Han Chinese norms, Professor Leibold added.
“Under Xi Jinping, the CCP has intensified its colonial dispossession of Xinjiang and other border territories.”
Professor Leibold gave the example of changing the name of the city Kashgar, which means “place of stones” in Persian, to the Chinese word Kashi.
“This great cultural and architectural center of Altishahr [a historical name for the Tarim Basin] it becomes just a Chinese city,” he said.
The original Persian word was also a link to Uyghur history and identity that is distinct from China and its colonial occupation, he added.
Impacts on local villagers
The report's authors interviewed 11 Uyghurs living in villages with changed names.
A villager struggled to get home after being released from a re-education camp because the ticket system no longer included the name of the country she knew.
She later faced difficulties in registering for government services due to the change.
Another villager said he wrote a poem and commissioned a song to commemorate all the lost places around where he had lived.
A 2017 Human Rights Watch report also found that Chinese authorities barred Uyghurs from using dozens of names with religious connotations common to Muslims around the world.
Renaming locations has occurred elsewhere in China.
Since 2017, China's Ministry of Civil Affairs began issuing official Chinese names for locations in Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India, which China claims belong to its southern Tibet region.
The Chinese government is also phasing out the name “Tibet” in official English-language references in favor of the region's Mandarin Chinese name “Xizang” from 2023.
ABC/AP
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