Chinese toponymical tactics in Xinjiang: One more move to erase East Turkestan

By Olivier Guillard, a specialist in Asian issues, research associate at the Institut d'études de géopolitique appliquée, a researcher at CERIAS (Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada), Director of Information at CRISIS24 (Paris), and lecturer (geopolitics; political science) at EDHEC Business School (Lille).  

East Turkestan is an area of 1.6 million square kilometers, constituting one-sixth of People's Republic of China's entire territory. Larger than Germany, Spain, and France combined, it shares borders with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, as well as Tibet to the south. Chinese authorities in East Turkestan (called by the CCP as "Xinjiang") have been steadily altering the names of hundreds of villages in a concerted effort to erase Uyghur culture. In a startling report released by international NGO, Human Rights Watch (HRW), done in partnership with the Norway-based organization Uyghur Hjelp on 18 June 2024, a comparison of the names of 25,000 East Turkestan villages as listed by the National Bureau of Statistics of China between 2009 and 2023 is made.

Toponymical Changes

While the majority of the name changes "appear mundane" and occurred between 2017 and 2019, about 630 villages in East Turkestan have had their names changed to remove mentions to Islam or the Uyghurs' culture and history, the report reveals. The Chinese government wants to "erase people's historical memory, because those names remind people of who they are," said Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur linguist based in Norway and founder of Uyghur Hjelp.

Place and street names, although apparently an apolitical part of everyday life, are in fact often determined by the state for political ends, and authoritarian states often put politics front and centre. China, for example, has passed national legislation that restricts street and place names to those that support "national unity and the establishment of socialist modernization," while prohibiting those that "damage sovereignty or national dignity." Quantitative analysis and historical data suggest that the Chinese central government is most concerned with promoting "correct" names in areas with high ethnic tension or large numbers of ethnic minorities. These results suggest that Beijing sees geographic naming as an important promoter of national unity.

Words like dutar, a traditional Uyghur string instrument, or mazar, a shrine, have been removed from the names of villages, and substituted with words such as "happiness", "unity" and "harmony" — standard terms often found in the CCP's policy documents. The changes to the names of Xinjiang villages included removing mentions of 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 prior to the establishment of PRC in 1949 have also been removed, and words such as orda, which means "palace," sultan, and beg, which are political or honorific titles, have also been changed.

Chinese War on Uyghurs

The Chinese government has been cracking down on the Uyghurs for decades, but it is only post 9/11, Beijing took advantage of George Bush's so-called War on Terror to brand all opposition to Chinese rule as evil "Islamic terrorism" of the Al Qaeda variety. In recent years, they've gone much further and now seem to see all Uyghurs as potential terrorists, extremists, separatists. In May 2014, the Chinese government launched the "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" in East Turkestan. Since 2017, the Chinese government has carried out a widespread and systematic attack against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in East Turkestan. It includes mass arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, separation of families, forced labor, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights.

In February 2021, a report from The Intercept provided a rare glimpse into the persecution and sweeping internment of Muslims by the CCP in East Turkestan. In late December 2021, a highly regarded scientific journal has retracted a paper based on DNA samples from nearly 38,000 men in China, including Tibetans and Uyghurs who almost certainly did not give proper consent. In April 2023, a leaked tape revealed how Chinese surveillance firm Hikvision used ex-U.S. official to cover up Uyghur abuses by the CCP in East Turkestan. The U.N. Human Rights Office in 2022 found accusations of rights violations in East Turkestan "credible" and said China may have committed crimes against humanity in the region.

It is reported that Twitter (now "X") was complicit in promoting disinformation on the repression of Uyghurs in East Turkestan, so does Chinese state media like CGTN and Xinhua's foreign language social media and TV channels. CCP has targeted "friendly media" including Discovery Channel, and panda-hugging diplomats in the Islamic countries to tell "Xinjiang's story well". It has been identified through open source satellite imagery that Beijing has destroyed majority of famous mosques under the garb of sinicization,as has been the case even in non-Muslim majority southern Chinese province of Yunnan. Beijing has banned Uighur parents from naming their sons Muhammad; blocked their children from entering mosques; forbade Uyghur government employees from fasting during Ramadan. Uyghur Muslim men are prohibited from growing "abnormally" long beards, while Uyghur Muslim women cannot wear the face veil in public.

Uyghur Refugees in Turkey & Pakistan

Those who could fortunately escape the Chinese torture to Islamic countries like Turkey or Pakistan are not even spared, with Beijing's extended surveillance among the Uyghur refugees. Some Han Chinese have abused the easily-issued Turkish citizenship to infiltrate areas sensitive to CCP's concerns, including EU, USA and India, while Ankara has made life difficult for escaped Uyghurs. Pakistan, which neighbors East Turkestan through PoK, backs China's regressive acts on Uyghurs and works closely in assisting the long-arm tactics of Chinese state security apparatus in taming Uyghur refugees in the Islamic Republic.

Turning East Turkestan into a Land of Amnesia

James Leibold, a La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) expert on China's ethnic policy, said[i] that the renaming alterations are a direct response to Chinese President Xi Jinping's call for the sinicization of religions at the 2016 Central Religious Work Conference. "This unleashed CCP officials to 'rectify' not only the place names 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," he said. "This process of cultural expurgation was also a part of a wider clampdown on perceived religious extremism and terrorism that resulted in an estimated one million Uyghurs and other minorities being extra-judicially imprisoned in re-education camps across East Turkestan."

The HRW report's authors interviewed 11 Uyghurs who lived in villages with changed names. One villager faced difficulties going home after being released from a re-education camp because the ticketing system no longer included the name of the place she knew. She later faced difficulties registering for government services due to the change. Another villager said he wrote a poem and commissioned a song to commemorate all the lost locations around where he had lived.

Renaming locations have happened elsewhere in China. Since 2017, China's Ministry of Civil Affairs started to issue official Chinese names for locations in Arunachal Pradesh State in north-east India, which China claims to belong to "its southern Tibet" region. The Chinese government is also gradually dropping the name "Tibet" in official English-language references in favor of the region's Chinese name Xizang since 2023. Chinese despicable tentacles have not stopped even in the Himalayan states of Bhutan and Nepal.

Implications for Uyghurs and Islamic World

Once established, a toponym becomes part of the culture, memory, and identity of the place, playing out emotive values for the inhabitants. Moreover, seemingly ordinary and mundane toponyms are often times politically charged entities, promoting the ideologies of the governing authorities. Under the aegis of cultural confidence and national dignity, the Chinese authorities stigmatized Uyghur toponyms as xenophilic and launched massive campaigns to rectify them. Such endeavors could be seen as "a statement about official identity politics".

Mid-July 2024, the US State Department announced it was taking steps to impose visa restrictions on People's Republic of China (PRC) officials for their involvement in repression of marginalized religious and ethnic communities: "The PRC has not lived up to its commitments to respect and protect human rights, as demonstrated by the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, the erosion of fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong, persistent human-rights abuses in Tibet, and transnational repression around the world."

The Chinese nation-building elite's agenda to depoliticize Uyghur ethnicity through lessening, diluting, and assimilating ethnic diversities into Chinese homogeneity has led to nomenclatural tensions and pragmatic incongruences. This is well reflected in the helpless situation in actively experiencing sinicization and the process of their integration into the newly constructed nation-state of China. Thus, Chinese toponymical tactics in East Turkestan has become another blow in collective erasure of the culture and history of Uyghurs. It is extremely important for the international community, especially countries in the Islamic world, such as Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia to rise and amplify their voice against the brutal atrocities of the CCP in East Turkestan.

Sitography

• Why Don't We Care About China's Uyghur Muslims ? Online : https://theintercept.com/2019/12/29/why-dont-we-care-about-chinas-uighur-muslims/

• China: Hundreds of Uyghur Village Names Change. Online: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/06/18/china-hundreds-uyghur-village-names-change

• Website Uyghur Hjelp. Online: https://uyghurhjelp.org/articles/

• Practicing and Managing Foreign Toponyms in China: Cultural Politics and Ideologies. Online: https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/view/2435/2395

• Place Names, Symbolic Power and the Chinese State. Online: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2308814

• City-renaming and its effects in China. En ligne : https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-017-9772-0

• China's Vanishing Muslims: Undercover In The Most Dystopian Place In The World. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ

• "Eradicating Ideological Viruses" China's Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang's Muslims. Online: https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/09/10/eradicating-ideological-viruses/chinas-campaign-repression-against-xinjiangs

• Inside China's Police State Tactics Against Muslims. Online: https://theintercept.com/2021/02/03/intercepted-china-uyghur-muslim-surveillance-police/

• China's secret internment camps. En ligne : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMkHcZ5IwjU

• Journal Retracts Paper Based on DNA of Vulnerable Chinese Minorities. Online: https://theintercept.com/2021/12/13/china-uyghur-dna-human-genetics-retraction/

• Leaked Tape Reveals How Spy Camera Firm Used Ex-U.S. Official to Cover Up Uyghur Abuses. Online: https://theintercept.com/2023/04/21/hikvision-leaked-tape-uyghur-surveillance/

• OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China. Online: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ohchr-assessment-human-rights-concerns-xinjiang-uyghur-autonomous-region

• Twitter Helped Chinese Government Promote Disinformation on Repression of Uyghurs. Online: https://theintercept.com/2019/08/19/twitter-ads-china-uighurs/

• "In Other News": China's International Media Strategy on Xinjiang—CGTN and New China TV on YouTube. Online: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00977004231169008

• New frontiers in foreign propaganda. Online: https://chinamediaproject.org/2024/03/05/new-frontiers-in-foreign-propaganda/

• Are Historic Mosques In Xinjiang Being Destroyed? Online: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2019/04/05/are-historic-mosques-in-xinjiang-being-destroyed/

• Crowd in China clashes with police over plans to demolish mosque. Online: https://apnews.com/article/china-muslim-mosque-protest-93e2e1e072fa908729b2b1598a1b06f0

• Turkish media reveal identities of alleged spies for China. Online: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/spies-for-china-03012024124100.html

• How To Become a Turkish Citizen as Chinese? Online: https://www.tremglobal.com/articles/how-to-become-a-turkish-citizen-as-chinese

• The Chinese exploitation of Turkish citizenship to more easily obtain US/EU residency permits. Online: https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/01/26/chinese-turkish-eu-residency/

• Türkiye Betrayed Us. Online: https://uyghurhjelp.org/2024/04/turkiye-betrayed-us/

• Pakistan's Khan backs China on Uighurs, praises one-party system. Online: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/2/pakistan-imran-khan-china-uighurs

• Uyghurs Who Fled China Now Face Repression in Pakistan. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrplLEQQMnE

• China removing religious and cultural references from Xinjiang place names, rights groups say. Online: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-20/chinese-authorities-change-uyghurs-village-names-/104001048

• La Mongolie, le dalaï-lama et le « bouddhisme tibétain » : un mal de tête de plus pour Pékin en 2024 ? Online : https://www.institut-ega.org/l/la-mongolie%2c-le-dalai-lama-et-le-%c2%ab-bouddhisme-tibetain-%c2%bb-%3a-un-mal-de-tete-de-plus-pour-pekin-en-2024/

• China-India Name War Intensifies in the Himalayas. Online: https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/china-india-name-war-intensifies-in-the-himalayas/

• Inde : à quoi joue la Chine en Arunachal Pradesh ? Online: https://asialyst.com/fr/2023/04/13/inde-a-quoi-joue-chine-arunachal-pradesh/

• Chine : l'assaut méthodique contre le bouddhisme tibétain. Online: https://asialyst.com/fr/2023/04/29/chine-tibet-assaut-methodique-contre-bouddhisme-tibetain/

• China Is Building Entire Villages in Another Country's Territory. Online: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/china-bhutan-border-villages-security-forces/

• After 18-year gap, Nepal-China border talks next week. Online: https://kathmandupost.com/national/2024/06/15/after-18-year-gap-nepal-china-border-talks-next-week

• US sanctions more Chinese officials for 'genocide and crimes against humanity' in Xinjiang. Online: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3270322/us-keep-barring-chinese-officials-over-rights-concerns-xinjiang-and-tibet