On March 15, the third day of this year’s Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Muslims living in Yuxi, a city in China’s Yunnan province, woke up to an unusual message circulating on their WeChat threads. The prefectural Bureau of Ethnic and Religious Affairs had issued an “urgent public notice” authorizing surveillance of fasting among their schoolchildren.
“The Party Committee, governments, education, and sports bureaus of all levels should investigate the participation of minors in fasting and other religious activities,” the notice stated. It further required these organs to “adhere comprehensively to the principle of separation between education and religion, and strengthen the education and guidance of teachers, students, and the majority of young people.”
Yuxi is home to a significant population of a state-recognized ethnic Muslim minority nationality called the Hui. Partly descendants of Arab and Persian traders from the times of the Silk Road, they speak Mandarin and are racially indistinguishable from the Han majority. Despite this long history of assimilation, they find themselves today at the epicenter of a nationwide Sinification campaign that started in the wake of the Chinese Communist Party’s forum on religious work in April 2016. During the forum, President Xi Jinping instructed religious groups to “adhere to the leadership” of the Communist Party (CCP) and to “merge [their doctrines] with Chinese culture.”
Xi’s signature dream of national rejuvenation has little room for the cultural particularism of Soviet times, wherein minorities’ customs and languages were recognized. Instead, the modern CCP increasingly promotes the assimilation of all ethnic minorities into a single core as defined by Han Chinese culture.
So far, the campaign has centered on removing halal food signs written in Arabic and modifying the “foreign architecture” of mosques, actions that were justified as preventing the spread of the so-called trends of “Saudization and Arabization” among the Hui. Now that the majority of mosques have been beheaded of their domes and minarets, the notice in Yuxi brings into focus an even more critical dimension of the campaign: profiling Hui Muslim youth in the name of separation between religion and education.
The techniques being used now on the Hui were first honed by Beijing on Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities inhabiting the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Unprecedented securitization of the region over the past decade has led to the development of a high-tech surveillance state that monitors virtually every aspect of Muslim behavior. Leaked police files show people being incarcerated en masse for fasting during Ramadan, wearing a headscarf, or reciting the Quran. Beijing claims that the measures—dubbed “the People’s War on Terror”—are effective in combating terrorism and integrating Xinjiang with the rest of China.
The notice in Yuxi suggests that China’s treatment of its “model Muslim minority” is increasingly taking a Xinjiang turn. Reports show that so-called “convenient police stations,” installed throughout Xinjiang every few hundred feet from each other to monitor behavior, are spreading to neighboring provinces of Gansu and Qinghai. Meanwhile, party cadres from the province of Ningxia—another Hui stronghold—are traveling to the region to receive “anti-terrorism training.”
Not long ago, in Xinjiang during Ramadan of 2015, the infamous “watermelon incident” occurred, in which professors at the University of Medicine handed out watermelon slices to students in the middle of the day, when practicing Muslims fast. Those who refused the watermelon were reportedly threatened with the denial of their diplomas. The revelation led to violent protests in Turkey, putting so much diplomatic pressure on Beijing that the Xinjiang party chief Zhang Chunxian joined local Muslim representatives for an iftar to celebrate the last day of Ramadan, the first such occasion in the history of modern Xinjiang.
The regional response was as unprecedented as the global outcry, but when the Hui hear stories of events that echo the watermelon incident, they remember that it was a forerunner to an intensified surveillance regime among Uyghurs that soon became a full-scale campaign of coercion and assimilation.
Organized religion is highly restricted in China despite Beijing claiming to uphold the freedom of religious belief enshrined in the constitution. Islam is treated with particular harshness: Conducting Muslim funerals is restricted in Xinjiang, while Daoist priests are invited and get paid to give proper farewells to the deceased throughout China. Han parents and kids flood Buddhist and Confucian temples to pray for success in university entrance exams, but Hui minors are barred from studying religion. In 2016, for instance, nursery schools in the Gansu province were prohibited from teaching Islam after a video of a kindergarten girl reciting the Quran spread online. Authorities said the practice violates the “principle of separation between religion and education.” The same reason was cited to shut down the Hui-run child care centers and religious schools in Henan, Ningxia, and Yunnan.
The Hui children are just the latest target of official efforts to separate minority kids from the faith and culture of their parents. Youth in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous region are restricted from learning their language and history, while children in Tibet are being separated from their families and sent to boarding schools far from their homes to learn Mandarin. The Uyghur children “orphaned” by the mass incarceration and internment of their parents in Xinjiang are sent to schools or so-called welfare centers aimed at indoctrination into what it means to be Chinese.
At the time of the watermelon incident, I was doing ethnographic fieldwork in Shadian, a small but affluent Hui community located 90 miles from Yuxi where more than 1,600 Hui residents were massacred in July 1975 for resisting former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s iconoclastic policies during the Cultural Revolution. When I was there, outright surveillance of children wasn’t implemented yet, but the policing of Islam in schools in the name of “separation between religion and education” was already underway. For example, the prefectural Bureau of Education restricted schools from shortening lunchtime breaks during Ramadan and offering earlier release time to spare the fasting teachers and students from additional time under the sun’s heat.
Civil servants working in the local administration were also forbidden from wearing headscarves. Veiled Hui teachers had to submit new profile photos without headscarves, and past graduation photos that featured veiled teachers and students were removed from the walls of school corridors.
These measures were introduced following a March 2014 knife attack that happened in Yunnan’s provincial capital of Kunming. The national government claimed that the assailants were Uyghur separatists and classified it as a terrorist incident. When it became known that the assailants prepared for their attack in Shadian, the prefectural government vowed to “bring religion back onto the legal track.” Both teachers and parents complained to me that veiling restrictions lacked any reference to the law and were thus fundamentally Islamophobic.
In 2018, Xi absorbed the State Administration of Religious Affairs into the United Front Work Department, an organ created by Mao to deal specifically with entities and communities outside of the formal CCP circle. Religion shifted from being an administrative question to an ideological one, causing mutually accommodative relationships between local cadres and religious groups to deteriorate.
Shortly after that, the Chinese Islamic Association, the party’s supervisory organ of Muslim affairs in the country, publicized a five-year policy plan on “Persisting in the Sinification of Islam.” Similar plans were issued by supervisory organs for China’s Protestant and Catholic communities. While all stress the need for patriotic education, only the plan by the Islamic Association mentions the enforcement of separation between religion and education as a precondition for patriotism.
The plan, which also extended the ban on veiling to schoolchildren, functionally rendered any mention of Islam in schools consequential. “It was typical for students to write essays about their hometown, describing it as a place of a beautiful mosque, melodic call to prayer, and festive Ramadan,” one local Hui Chinese language teacher told me. “But these descriptions are very problematic now. The word ‘mosque’ alone is very sensitive. Instead, we now ask them to write about how the government organizes many interesting activities, how life becomes better, and how streets become wider. All in all, the essays must convey the spirit of patriotism now.”
For many Hui that I spoke with in Shadian at a time, the principle of separating religion and education sounded like a shorthand for the party’s desire to separate young Hui from the religion of their parents. “Our kids are citizens of China because we are their parents,” they lamented, “but we are not allowed to teach them our ways now.”
In Shadian today, the policing of Islam among children is becoming pervasive. Children are restricted from participating in religious retreats and activities, and madrasas are no longer allowed to organize them. Han teachers are being brought to madrasas as a way to secularize the Islamic curriculum, which both students and teachers told me places madrasas under careful watch.
This form of Sinicization through surveillance is shaped by Xi’s particular focus on indoctrination in his thought and policy. In 2018, Xi chaired the national conference on education, where he urged teachers to prioritize identification with the party among the national youth.
“If the first button is wrongly buttoned,” he said, “all the remaining buttons will be wrongly buttoned. Life must be buttoned up right from the beginning.” Xi began using this metaphor in September 2014 during his visit to Beijing Normal University, where he met with students training to be teachers.
A week later, then-Xinjiang party chief Zhang Chunxian justified the unprecedented “de-extremification” and reeducation campaign among Uyghurs as “buttoning the first button.”
A decade into its implementation, the campaign is known for its use of macabre face recognition equipment manufactured by the state-owned security company Hikvision. Recent reports suggest that such technology is now being introduced to schools in the rest of China.
In July 2022, for example, Hikvision successfully won a multimillion tender for the Smart Campus project at Minjiang University, located in the coastal province of Fujian. The tender included the development of a system called “Assisted Analysis of Ethnic Minority Students” which allows for the tracking of “dining records” and sending alerts to university administration when students are “suspected of fasting during the month of Ramadan.”
The very fact that such software was demanded by a public university is an ominous sign of what awaits China’s ethnically Muslim youth once they escape surveillance in their schools and hometowns. Like Uyghurs in Xinjiang, they can sever their connection with their faith, but they may never be able to assimilate fully to the dominant part of Chinese society. Their loyalty to the party will always be suspect—and their heritage a justification for their continued alienation and subjugation.
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