TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Authorities in China’s western Xinjiang area have actually been methodically changing the names of towns populated by Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities to show the judgment Communist Celebration’s ideology, as part of an attack on their cultural identity, a report launched by Person Rights Watch stated Wednesday.
About 630 towns in Xinjiang have actually had their names altered to eliminate recommendations to Islam or the Uyghurs’ culture and history, according to the group’s report, performed in partnership with the Norway-based company Uyghur Hjelp.
The report compared the names of 25,000 Xinjiang towns as noted by the National Bureau of Data of China in between 2009 and 2023.
Words like “dutar,” a conventional Uyghur string instrument, or “mazar,” a shrine, have actually been gotten rid of from the names of towns, and changed with words such as “joy,” “unity” and “consistency” — generic terms typically discovered in the Communist Celebration’s policy files.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry didn’t right away react to faxed concerns about the report and its policies in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is a large area surrounding Kazakhstan that is home to about 11 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. In 2017, the Chinese federal government released a project of assimilation that has actually consisted of mass detentions, declared political brainwashing, declared household separations and declared required labor to name a few techniques.
As part of the crackdown, more than 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities were approximated to be kept in extralegal internment camps. The Chinese federal government at the time explained the camps as ” occupation training centers ” and stated they were needed to suppress separatism and spiritual extremism.
The U.N. Human Being Rights Workplace in 2022 discovered allegations of rights offenses in Xinjiang “reliable” and stated China might have dedicated criminal offenses versus humankind in the area.
The modifications to the names of Xinjiang towns consisted of eliminating discusses of religious beliefs, consisting of terms such as “Hoja,” a title for a Sufi spiritual instructor, and “haniqa,” a kind of Sufi spiritual structure, or terms such as “baxshi,” a shaman.
Recommendations to Uyghur history or to local leaders prior to the facility of individuals’s Republic of China in 1949 have actually likewise been gotten rid of, according to the report.
“The Chinese authorities have actually been altering numerous town names in Xinjiang from those abundant in indicating for Uyghurs to those that show federal government propaganda,” stated Maya Wang, acting China director at Person Rights Watch. “These name modifications appear part of Chinese federal government efforts to eliminate the cultural and spiritual expressions of Uyghurs.”
The Chinese federal government wishes to “eliminate individuals’s historic memory, since those names advise individuals of who they are,” stated Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur linguist based in Norway and creator of Uyghur Hjelp.
The majority of the town name modifications took place in between 2017 and 2019, at the height of the federal government crackdown in Xinjiang, according to the report.