Of Mosques and Men

Early into the campaign against China, scholars such as Zenz began to accuse the government not of genocide per se, but of “cultural genocide”—namely, the crime of erasing the cultural world of a people. Two accusations should be taken seriously: first, that there is a population decline amongst the Uyghurs and second, that there is an attack on mosques in China. According to the 2020 Chinese national census, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang grew from 10 million to 11.6 million, an increase of 1.6 million over the past decade. The data offered in the census show that the Uyghur population grew at 1.67 percent per year from 2000 to 2020, a growth rate double that of other ethnic minorities in China. With the poverty eradication program in full swing, it should be expected that this growth rate will not be maintained as families with higher incomes often choose not to have many children, and so it will be likely that the growth rate will decline. This is a normal process in human history known as the demographic transition. By 2020, poverty rates had fallen sharply in XUAR, Uyghur life expectancy has increased, and overall data on education and health has improved modestly but certainly improved. On the issue of attacks on mosques, there is very interesting data. According to the last official Chinese government source (the State Council white paper of 2016), there are 24,800 venues for religious activities in Xinjiang (and out of those, 24,400 mosques); this compares to fewer than 2,000 mosques in the 1980s. Leibold’s Strategic Policy Institute released a report in 2020 saying that 16,000 mosques had been damaged or destroyed, with only 15,500 still standing. This report was based largely on analysis of satellite imagery. Since the Australian report is largely without details, it is difficult to go mosque by mosque to verify its claims.

However, there is another interesting demographic detail that should be considered. There are 813,000 Muslims in Australia, and there are around 600 mosques in the country, which means that there is a mosque for 1,355 Australian Muslims. The Muslim population in XUAR is roughly 13 million (11.6 million Uyghurs), and, using 2020 data, with 24,400 mosques. This means that there is a mosque for every 533 Muslims, and, with the alleged reduction to 15,500, there is a mosque for every 839 Muslims. In both cases, the density of mosques in China’s XUAR is greater than in Australia, and in Australia there have been a spate of attacks against mosques, as well as campaigns to prevent mosques being opened (the most famous being the Bendigo and Ballarat mosques in the state of Victoria). No report about these atrocities came from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. In the United States, in constrast, attacks against mosques and prevention of the building of mosques have become normal, with elected officials on the record with statements against Muslims and particularly against Islam in the United States. No report about these atrocities has come from the Jamestown Foundation.

Wang Hui, who teaches at Tsinghua University, has argued that ethnic governance in China since the Reform and Opening period of 1978 has undergone a process of “depoliticization,” in which ethnic relations have been recast as problems of administration, development, and security. Political questions that involve historical difference, institutional pluralism, equality, and trust amongst peoples have been set aside. For Wang, ethnic relations cannot be reduced to technical problems — to poverty, insufficient integration, or extremism. Structural inequalities are obscured by this approach, which fails to see the political implications involved in ethnic relations: dialogue is necessary to build trust in a diverse country, and ethnic unity cannot be secured through technocratic management but only through recognition of cultural difference and substantive equality. This is a fundamental point, namely, that even though the development strategy has lifted millions of Chinese minority groups out of poverty, the lack of understanding and the lack of trust across populations must be dealt with politically. What this will come to mean in practice is not easy to imagine.