Note: Everything is under control

Everything is under control. The Chinese Communist Party is expanding its clampdown on Muslims, with Beijing now surveilling and destroying the mosques of Hui communities across China. The Mandarin-speaking Hui are the country’s largest Muslim minority and—though they trace part of their ancestry to Arab and Persian traders from the ancient Silk Road—visibly indistinguishable from the Han majority. In March, to undermine Islamic teaching in schools, local CCP officials in Yuxi—a Hui city in Yunnan Province—authorized investigating local children for fasting during Ramadan.

Throughout Hui communities, authorities have forbidden children from learning scriptures or entering religious buildings; restricted them from participating in religious retreats or activities; and prohibited religious schools—or madrasas—from organizing either. The authorities have also removed signs advertising halal food and knocked down the domes and minarets from hundreds of Hui mosques. Now they’re importing Han teachers for the madrasas and kicking out Hui ones, to secularize teaching.

In September 2023, Kalbinur Sidik examined Beijing’s repression of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims in northwestern China, where more than a million people have been incarcerated since 2016. Uyghurs who’ve had any contact with the outside world or outwardly displayed their Muslim faith end up, Sidik says, in internment camps—where they’re shackled, unable to clean themselves, poorly fed, and tortured. It’s all as part of a campaign to “reeducate” them away from Islam and their ethnic traditions—a campaign the CCP has called the “People’s War on Terror.”