How China Deals With Muslims

From FrontPage:

This year, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the government implemented strict rules governing all aspects of Uighur religious life. Henceforth, according to a recent report out of Xinjiang province, “official versions” of the Koran will be the only legal ones; imams will be barred from teaching the Koran in private; the study of Arabic will be allowed only at special government schools; and Muslim students and government workers will be “compelled to eat” during the Ramadan fast. Those Uighurs wishing to make the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, will be obligated to do so through government-run tours that are virtually unaffordable to the average Chinese Muslim.

The Chinese government is crippled by no moral qualms about how to respond to terrorism. The Chinese Muslims being held in Guantanamo Bay would have been tortured and killed long ago had they been captured by the Chinese instead of the Americans. In fact, this was the main argument against repatriating them to China.

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China's Got The Cancer Too!

Yes, China has the cancer of Islamism. We may be concerned about human rights in China and how they are brutally suppressing the Tibetans but they have a growing problem with Muslims as do the rest of the world. We all know that the koranic led Islamists have an agenda that is counter to our values of freedom and democracy.

On the other hand we are aware that our freedom and democracy can not and will not take the necessary steps to stop them and ultimately we will be enslaved to Islam.

Many of us on these infidel sites have said that undemocratic means to deal with the problem are the only solution. We only hint at the methods to be employed. Perhaps the methods employed by the Chinese are what we are hinting at.

I for one find I cannot criticise the Chinese for cracking down on their Muslims because I know that nothing else will work. and a Muslim dominated China would be a disaster for the world. On the other hand am I employing double standards if I criticise them for their policy in Tibet? Watch this developing news with my bolding:

SHANGHAI — Chinese officials said Wednesday that they were grappling with ethnic unrest on a second front, in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where Uighur Muslims protested Chinese rule late last month even as Tibetans rioted in the southwest.

One Uighur demonstration, which appears to have been quickly suppressed, took place in the town of Khotan on March 23, at the same time China was deploying thousands of security forces across a broad swath of its southwest to put down Tibetan unrest.

Officials said the protest was staged by Islamic separatist groups seeking to foment a broader uprising in Xinjiang. China often blames any ethnic disturbances on what it calls splittists and terrorists. Human rights groups say that Chinese Uighurs, like Tibetans, have fought for greater freedom to practice their religion as well as more autonomy from Beijing.

The news of the protest in Xinjiang underscored the breadth of China’s problems with ethnic and religious minority groups in the country’s vast western regions, where there is a long history of unhappiness with Chinese rule. Ethnic groups Beijing has sought to pacify with economic development programs and suppress with heavy police presence appear to be using the upcoming Olympic Games, to be held in Beijing, as an opportunity to press their grievances and attract international attention to their causes.

“A small number of elements tried to incite splittism, create disturbances in the market place and even trick the masses into an uprising,” a statement published on the Web site of the Khotan government said in the first official acknowledgment of the disturbances.

Uighur residents of Khotan reached by telephone either claimed not to understand Chinese or refused to talk about recent events there. But Han residents said that as many as 500 Uighurs protested in the center of the city. Some reports have said the Uighurs, who are Muslim, were objecting to restrictions on wearing Islamic scarves and head coverings. Some interviewees, however, said the protesters were seeking independence. The demonstrators were quickly arrested by security forces who took control of the area.

Zhu Linxiu, a senior police official in Khotan, declined to comment in detail about the incident, saying it was “inappropriate to publicize.” He refused to confirm the number of protesters or arrests, but said the demonstrators were “instigated by bad elements.”

Two weeks before the reported protest in Khotan, China announced the discovery of what it called a terrorist plot in Xinjiang, which it said involved the smuggling of combustible liquids onto a commercial airliner by a Uighur woman who had spent time in neighboring Pakistan.

Doh! They have the same Muslims as we do.

Officials called the incident part of a terrorist campaign by a radical Islamic independence group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. Uighur groups have denied the reports, and called them part of an effort to justify heavily stepped-up security in the region and the suppression of dissent before the Olympics.

In recent days, Beijing has also accused supporters of the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, of plotting a suicide bombing campaign against China, as part of a separatist campaign.

On Tuesday, Amnesty International criticized the government for its crackdown on protest in Tibetan areas of China, and said the country’s efforts to silence dissidents before the Olympics violated Beijing’s pledges to improve human rights before it hosts the games in August. “The Olympic Games have so far failed to act as a catalyst for reform,” the international human rights groups said in a statement. “Unless urgent steps are taken to redress the situation, a positive human rights legacy for the Beijing Olympics looks increasingly beyond reach.”

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, denounced the Amnesty statement as “biased,” saying “anyone planning to use the Olympics to threaten China, or planning to put pressure on China, has miscalculated.”

Like Tibetans in Tibet, Uighurs have historically been the predominant ethnic group in Xinjiang, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In both Tibet and Xinjiang, indigenous groups have chafed at the arrival of large numbers Han Chinese, the country’s predominant ethnic groups, who have migrated to western regions with strong government support.

Uighurs, like Tibetans, have complained that recent Han arrivals now dominate their local economies, even as the Han-run local governments insert themselves deeper into schools and religious practices to weed out cultural practices that officials fear might reinforce a separate ethnic or religious identity. In telephone interviews, Han residents of Khotan and nearby areas said there was a long history of distrust and tension between Han and Uighur communities. Some Han migrants insisted the atmosphere remained volatile, and said that the Uighurs had been inspired by the recent Tibetan unrest.

Interesting that the Chinese employ Muslim tacticts; mass immigration to swamp the indigenous people.

“Some of jobless people here have heard about the situation Tibet, and they also want to make trouble,” said Wang Guoliang, a Han grocery store owner in Khotan. “They want independence and they want to expel the Han, whom they dislike. Most of the main cadres in the Party, from counties and the cities to the provincial level are all Hans, while the local level officials are Uighur.” Mr. Wang called the purging of Uighur officials several years ago after a previous bout of tension “the root of the protest.”

Another Han, a clerk in a local bank who would only give his name as Chen, said there had been a long history of discontent in the region, and that people had been “on the lookout” since mid-March. At his bank, Mr. Chen said there had been grumblings over the restrictions on Muslim headgear, which he disagreed with, saying: “It is their national custom and we should respect it.”

(cross posted with CommonSense)

Demographic Change In China?

(All emphases by Always On Watch)




Photo credit
Excerpt from "Chasing the Chinese Dream: A Growing Number of the World's Emigrants Are Heading East, Rather Than West, in Search of Safety, Tolerance and Opportunity", an article in the October 21, 2007 edition of the Washington Post:

...In Yiwu, a city in the eastern province of Zhejiang that is the home of the world's largest wholesale market, "Exotic Street" lights up at night with stands filled with smoking kebabs, colorful hookahs and strong sugared tea for the almost exclusively Arab clientele.

Communist China's first attempt to make friends with outsiders and encourage cultural exchange came during the 1960s and '70s, as part of a campaign for ideological leadership in the developing world. China sought to spread socialism and unite the farmers of the world.

Today, its efforts to woo developing countries are driven by more calculated, strategic goals, most notably its need to secure long-term contracts for oil, gas and minerals to fuel its booming economy.

As part of this campaign, China has sought to portray itself as more open to Islam than other non-Muslim nations.

Over the past 20 years, the government has gradually allowed its own Muslim minority to rebuild institutions that were devastated by state-sponsored attacks on Islam during the Cultural Revolution. Islamic schools have opened, and scholars of Islam are being encouraged to go abroad to pursue their studies. Unlike Christians, China's estimated 20 million Muslims are considered an ethnic minority, a status that confers certain protections and privileges.

"In America, for people with my religion there can be a lot of problems," said Adamou Salissou, 25, from Niger. "The image they have of Muslims is that they are terrorists. Chinese don't have a problem with religion. They think, 'It's your religion and it's okay.' "

With funds from a Chinese government scholarship, Salissou is pursuing a master's degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at Xiamen University in Fujian province, where a community of Arab traders thrived in the 7th and 8th centuries. Salissou's brother Nour Mahamane, 23, joined him this fall and is studying for a master's degree in petrochemistry in Shanghai.

Mosques in areas such as Yiwu, where foreigners are concentrated, have been given more freedom than some others, which are under strict state control. Officials at the mosque here estimate that more than 20,000 Muslim immigrants, about 1,000 of them from Iraq, have settled in the area over the past five years....

The camel's nose in the tent. China is not welcoming these Muslim immigrants with open arms, however:

...But there are limits to China's welcome.

It's nearly impossible for foreigners who don't have Chinese ancestry to obtain citizenship, and like anywhere else, China has had its share of racial misunderstandings and clashes with foreigners....

The article concludes as follows:

In Yiwu, there was anger in the Iraqi community after an Iraqi man, Mostafa Ahmed Alazawi, was found dead in his rented home on March 30. His family wanted him to be buried in China and applied to the city for a piece of land. The city ruled that foreigners could not be buried in China, forcing the family to ship the body back to Iraq. The decision fueled outrage among the Iraqis. Through a friend, the family declined to be interviewed.

Anwar said that despite the tensions he's happier to be in China than elsewhere in the world.

"My brother lived in the Netherlands for nine years," he said. "There, if you are a foreigner, you are below them. When he came to China, everything was different. Here, if you are a foreigner, you are treated better than Chinese."

You can read the entire WaPo article HERE.