Chinese media, CCP leaders, and apologists have been recycling the official number of mosques to convince you that Uyghurs and Kazakhs can freely express piety. This number is meaningless. Here are the facts (from Chinese sources):
Minors, college students, and anyone who is employed by the government cannot attend mosque. Period. It is stated explicitly outside many mosques (my photo from Pichan which says no minors can enter).
Schools devote classroom time to instruct students not to believe in religion and not to enter mosques.
Individuals employed by the state often have to take oaths never to participate in religious activities.
Mosque activities--who enters, what is being said, who dons sällä, etc.--are monitored with both centralized, high-tech surveillance equipment and cadres.
Mosques are being destroyed/re-purposed. By 2016, some work teams noted “adjusted numbers” (i.e. destroyed) of local mosques. In this village the number of mosques was “adjusted” from 10 to 4 because of new “concentrated” residential living.
In October 2019, a Han tourist in southern Uyghur communities noted that mosques were no longer allowed to hold communal worship and the number of mosques were declining annually.
The CCP is also secularizing important life cycle rituals, what official call the “four activities”. Officials must attend all sacred rites (based on Chinese sources). chinafile.com/reporting-opin….
Uyghurs are also changing their names and the names of their children because they are too "religious" (even variants of the Prophet. Pictures from Xinjiang Daily Online.
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In celebration of the anniversay of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's Nobel Prize, here are some of the songs about him that I've translated (be sure CC is on for English subtitles):
From the China Islamic Association’s #Uyghur language official imam manual: imams must advise the people to avoid weeping loudly and shedding tears at the cemetery. Why this instruction exposes CCP hypocrisy on “extremism”. A thread.
First, some background. The book, A Handbook for Imams of the New Era, was published in 2005 and republished at least once in 2009 by the China Islamic Association and #Xinjiang University Press. It was originally written in Chinese and translated into Uyghur.
Organized under the United Front, the China Islamic Association is the main gov't organ on matters dealing with Islam overseeing activities that “benefit religious harmony, ethnic unity…” and it “contributes to the great revitalization of the Zhonghua minzu (Chinese nation)."
In celebration of HHDL's @DalaiLama's 87th birthday, here is a list of songs I've translated in which brave musicians in Tibet take serious risks making tribute to him
The headshots are unnerving...very important collection indeed. but these are not the first photos inside detention/re-education centers w/o official authorization. I've made images public for several years now @ProjectXinjiang.
Also need to be precise w/ terms. although detention centers 看守所 are part of the "re-education" process (and one facility for the three-types people 三类人员)--and some may pass through them before re-education or prison--they aren't "transformation through education" centers
Today, I'm shining @NBCOlympics #OlympicGames spotlight for the first time @shahitbiz on my friend Ekber Ebeydullah, who has been detained since 2016
I met Ekber in Beijing in 2010. He was studying at university after four years in the Xinjiang Class boarding school. He is extremely bright, fluent in four languages (Uyghur, Turkish, Chinese, and English).
After graduating, he went to Turkey for post-graduate studies. Upon returning home in 2016 for a relative's wedding, he was detained. A mutual friend told me the news summer 2017 in Urumchi. Like many others, his crime was being #Uyghur.