After stories about Ramadan “fasting bans” made headlines in
Indonesia and
Pakistan, China invited officials from both countries to the far northwest for government-guided tours.
Indonesian official returned from his free trip with white-paper-style praise: “The [Chinese] state guarantees freedom of religion to all religions,” he
said.
A Pakistani observer
said he saw no evidence of restrictions on teachers, students and government employees — odd, given that those are China’s
plainly stated rules.
The Ramadan propaganda war says much about faith and freedom in President Xi Jinping’s China.
By the Communist Party’s count, Islam is thriving in Xinjiang. Chinese state news media
note that the number of mosques in the region has increased tenfold in 30 years and that the government has paid for thousands of students to travel abroad to study the faith.
Chinese authorities insist that Xinjiang’s Muslim Uighurs — like
Christians and
Tibetan Buddhists — are free to worship as they wish. But what they mean, really, is that they are free to worship on the party’s terms.
In a front-page report on Ramadan in Xinjiang, the Global Times, a party-controlled newspaper,
noted that Ramadan was proceeding “without government interference” because the government has “only imposed an exemption from this practice on Party members, civil servants and underage students.”