Analysis of official data from human rights groups from 2009-2023 shows that around 630 villages in Xinjiang have had their names changed in this way.
China has “systematically” changed the names of hundreds of villages with religious, historical or cultural significance to the Uyghurs to names that resonate with Chinese Communist Party ideology, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch.
The rights group, working in partnership with Norwegian rights organization Uyghur Hjelp, said it had identified 630 villages in the far western Xinjiang region whose names were changed in this way, collecting data from 2009 to 2023 on the Department’s website. National Statistics. from China. The most common substitutions were Happiness, Unity and Harmony.
“Chinese authorities have changed hundreds of village names in Xinjiang, from those rich in meaning for the Uighurs, to those that reflect government propaganda,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement accompanying the report. report on Wednesday. “These name changes appear to be part of the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Uyghur cultural and religious expressions.”
China’s policies in Xinjiang drew international attention in 2018, when the United Nations said that at least one million mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities were being held in a network of re-education centers. Beijing said the camps were vocational training centers that taught Mandarin and other skills needed to combat “extremism” and prevent “terrorism.”
Official leaks government documentsInvestigations by human rights groups and academics, as well as testimony from Uyghurs themselves, revealed that Uyghurs had also been targets of other alleged abuses, from forced sterilization to family separation and attacks on religious beliefs and traditions.
Human Rights Watch’s latest report states that most of the village name changes occurred between 2017 and 2019 – the height of the repression – and secured references to Uyghur history, including the names of their kingdoms, republics and local leaders before the People’s Republic. from China. was created in 1949, were removed. Village names were also changed if they involved terms that suggested Uighur cultural practices, such as mazar (shrine) and dutar (a two-stringed lute).
Among the report’s examples was the village Qutpidin Mazar in Kashgar, which was originally named after a shrine of the 13th-century Persian polymath and poet Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, but became known as the Rose Flower village in 2018. While This, Dutar Village in Karakax County was renamed Red Flag Village in 2022.
Uyghur Hjelp interviewed 11 Uyghurs living in villages whose names had been changed and found that the experience had a profound effect on them. One villager told the group that she faced difficulties returning home after being released from a re-education camp because the name of the village she knew was no longer included in the ticket system. Another villager told Uyghur Hjelp that he had written a poem and commissioned a song as a memorial to the now-lost places where he once lived.
Then-UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet requested access to Xinjiang when details about the re-education camps emerged.
She was finally allowed to visit in 2022 and concluded that “serious human rights violations” had been committed and that the scale of the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim groups… “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” .
Abduweli Ayup, founder of Uyghur Hjelp, urged international governments to do more to pressure China over the situation in Xinjiang, where he said hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs remained “unjustly imprisoned”.
“Concerned governments and the UN human rights office should intensify their efforts to hold the Chinese government accountable for its abuses in the Uyghur region,” he said in the statement.
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