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When are you going back to Arabia?’: Chinese Muslims became the target of online hate

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A lack of education over what the Communist Party refers to as ‘feudal superstitions’ is fuelling a rise in anti-Islam rhetoric, prompting fears that online tensions will spill over into real-world conflict.


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When Aysha Xiong posted online photographs of herself and two roommates sporting their favourite headwear, the last thing they expected was to be swamped by hundreds of angry and humiliating comments.

She posted the images on a WeChat mini site called “The Hijab channel”, created by the trio to give Muslim women a place to share stories about headscarves, faith, work and life. It is a relatively obscure platform for the three roommates, their posts filled with photos much like millions of others that are uploaded to the internet on a daily basis.

But when their photo was reposted on Weibo – a social media site sometimes described as “China’s Twitter” – the three women from Kunming ( 昆明 ), Yunnan ( 雲南 ) province, found themselves at the centre of a flood of abusive comments, the latest victims of growing anti-Islamic sentiment on the Chinese mainland that has been fuelled by widespread – many say exaggerated – fears of terrorism.

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“China needs no evil cult”, said the comment with the most “likes” from other users. Another popular one asked “When are you going back to Arabia?”

Xiong, a 23-year-old Han Chinese who converted to Islam three years ago, and her two friends, from the predominantly Muslim Hui ethnic minority, say the experience has left them more determined to persevere with the channel.


“I want to tell you my own story bit by bit, and let you know Islam is nothing to be afraid of,” she wrote on Weibo, responding to the hateful comments. “Muslims live in the same way as non-Muslims.” As simple as Xiong’s message seems, it may be falling on deaf ears – even when it comes to China’s young and educated internet users.


The growing popularity of anti-Islamic rhetoric, which is seldom challenged by state media or subject to the censorship for which China’s internet is famous, has sparked concerns that, left unaddressed, these tensions will spill over into real world conflict.

Zhou”, a 23-year-old web developer in Qingdao, Shandong province, is staunchly anti-Muslim. He and his friends call themselves Mu Hei (Muslim haters) and refer to Muslims derogatorily as “greens”, a slur based on the colour’s symbolic significance in Islam. Zhou said he became Mu Hei because Islam was an “inhumane” religion that encouraged violence and repressed women.

Inflammatory comments Zhou has posted online include “let’s shoot down 100 greens” and “why not kill all the greens? ”I
wish there were no Muslims in the world,” he said, declining to give his full name because “the greens may come to chop me”.

Zhou plans to study in the United States and work in Silicon Valley, speaks English well and follows world news closely. But he has never talked to a Muslim. Like most of his compatriots, Zhou grew up being told to stay away from religions, or what the Communist Party deems “feudal superstitions”. Experts say a lack of religious education in the past six decades has contributed to today’s intolerance and hate.

Most Chinese Muslims are members of ethnic minorities living in western parts of the country, with the largest groups being the Uygurs and Hui. Typically those in the Han majority, including policymakers in Beijing, have little knowledge about Islam and thus view it as a threat, Gladney said.

The Chinese government blames Islamic militants for the unrest in Xinjiang and an attack on the main railway station in Kunming in March 2014 by eight knife-wielding terrorists that claimed the lives of 31 civilians. Terror attacks in Europe and the rise of Islamic State in the Middle East have added to worries about the spread of extremism at home.

In March last year, a proposal to establish a national law regulating halal food triggered outcries that a religious minority was trying to control the state.

And in October , a prominent Uygur entrepreneur criticised Alibaba, the owner of the South China Morning Post, for naming its online travel service a phrase that means “flying pig” – pigs are taboo for Muslims. The travel’s site’s English name is Fliggy.

Unconfirmed reports of Muslims attacking halal restaurants operated by Han people have also spawned online accusations that Islam encourages violence.

James Leibold, an expert on China’s ethnic minorities at La Trobe University in Australia, said that while such religious hatreds are often denounced by left-wing media and advocacy groups in the West, alternative voices are seldom heard in China’s closed society.

“The inevitable result is it creates a deeper divide between the Han majority and Chinese Muslims,” Leibold said. “At present it might be chiefly an online phenomenon, but it has the potential to spill over into the real world and result in violence.”

In China, however, such inflammatory language seems to escape the scrutiny of internet censors, while the state-controlled media largely stay silent. Leibold said the indifference reflects a deep-rooted distrust of Islam within the leadership.

“Posts about Hong Kong independence get deleted immediately, and yet you have this Islamophobia that clearly violates Chinese law that’s not censored,”
he said. “There are senior Communist Party officials who are deeply concerned about the spread of religion in China. Islam is directly linked in the minds of some officials to terrorism.”

Wang Zuoan, chief of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, said in November that Islamic extremism was infiltrating China’s “inland provincial areas”. Speaking to a national congress of Muslims, Wang said Chinese Muslims should “always keep to the direction of developing Islam with Chinese characteristics”.

And when President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited a mosque in western China in July last year, he said Chinese Muslims should promote social harmony and resist illegal religious “infiltration”. Such warnings have encouraged some members of the public to join the fight against what they view as extremism.

On Weibo, a 33-year-old programmer surnamed Zhang launched an “anti-religious food campaign” aimed at steering non-Muslims away from halal food.

An article he posted online said Muslims were eager to implement Islamic law in every part of society, starting with what people ate. His post has been read by more than a million people. “I’m an atheist,” Zhang said in an email to This Week in Asia. “I reject all the religious food that contradicts my belief.”

Some 23 million of China’s 1.4 billion people are Muslim, and those practising Islam can feel outnumbered, overwhelmed and misunderstood during any online war of words.

Ma Te, 27, a Hui Muslim living in Shanghai, said social media content created by Muslims tended to attract little interest from outsiders because it contained too much ethnic or religious jargon. And some Muslims who grew up speaking ethnic minority languages found it difficult to use written Chinese to express their opinions online, he said.

“Often there is no interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims,” Ma said. “Each group talks in its own way, within its own circle.”

Ma has teamed up with a few other Muslims to try to tell the mainland public what Islam means for its believers, something not found in textbooks or the state-controlled media. “We are Muslims who understand China’s popular youth culture, and we want to talk about Islam in a way that young people can understand,” he said.

For many, the struggle to bridge the religious and cultural gaps can be exhausting.

A Uygur Muslim who is studying in Hong Kong said she had “become numb” to stereotypes and attacks. “Whatever I say, they won’t believe me. Now I really don’t care,” said the 30-year-old from Xinjiang who preferred not to be named.

A 19-year-old Hui Muslim in Hunan ( 湖南 ) province said she used to argue with the Mu Hei online, but had since given up trying. “I later realised there was no way I could change them,” she said. “They just think we are all terrorists.” ■■


http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/socie...back-arabia-how-chinese-muslims-became-target
 
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Muslims in China don't get killed. Hindus in America get killed. Hindus in Australia get killed. But I don't see you open any thread about that. Talk about China obsession!
 
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Anything wrong is wrong.. Muslims anywhere doesn't deserve hatred.. :pakistan::china:
 
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The CIA poured billions into Xinjiang to brainwash Chinese muslims to take up arms against the state. The entire Uighur congress is based in the U.S. actively supported by U.S. intelligence.

Yet another failed secession/ regime change/ break away/ balkanization project for the CIA, just like Chechnya, Syria or Iraq.
 
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Uyghurs live a better life than most Hindus can imagine.
Oh and they also look down on Slumdians (like the rest of the world do).

Islamophobia in China and Pakistan’s vow of silence

Recently, in a country that is decidedly not France, a Muslim man has been sentenced to six years in prison for keeping a beard.

I daresay it’s time we have a polite talk about Islamophobia with our good neighbor in the north.

In the Muslim dominant region of Xinjiang, the 38-year-old man was handed the punishment by the Chinese court. In addition, his wife has been sentenced to two years of imprisonment for wearing an Islamic veil.

Ironically, this took place in Kashgar: the city romanticised in Iqbal’s poetry as one end of the unbreachable Muslim flank guarding the sacred ‘Haram’.

The couple was pronounced guilty of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, which is basically my job description as a blogger.

The charge is so absurdly vague and ambiguous; it may as well be Mandarin for “not liking one’s face”. Which is indeed what it sounds like, if one follows the trail of violent suppression of the Uighur populace through history, markedIslamophobia in China and Pakistan’s vow of silence with arbitrary arrests and baffling restrictions.

In July last year, the government forbade Xinjiang officials to fast in the month of Ramazan, and initiated a robust campaign discouraging native women from wearing veil. In Urmaqi, bus passengers were banned from carrying a wide range of common household items, including yoghurt.

The restrictions, each a flagrant assaulton the Uighur people’s cultural values, are justified by the most valuable excuse available to us in the post-9/11 universe: ‘security’.

These increasingly despotic measures are being adopted under the doctrine that counter-terrorism definitively trumps individual liberty, although I’m personally having a hard time figuring out how to weaponise yoghurt and facial hair.


I’d reach out and ask the exceptionally inventive Muslims of Uighur, had the Chinese government not dismantled the internet in that region almost to its entirety.

One may be forgiven for asking at this point, if there is a giant portrait of Mao Zedong hanging reverently somewhere in the upper offices of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).

These ‘whimsical’ freedom violations barely make up the prologue of a book on Chinese aggression against the Muslims of Xinjiang.

Between 1964 and 1996, China conducted more than 40 poorly-controlled, nuclear tests in Xinjiang. An expert who studied radiation effects from tests by the US, France, and former Soviet Union, calculated that as many as 194,000 people may have died from acute radiation poisoning, among a whopping 1.2 million people who received doses high enough to induce cancer and gross fetal abnormalities.

These are the “conservative estimates” of the damage caused in three decades.

If this form of aggression appears too indirect and impersonal, it should be viewed in context of decades of arbitrary arrests, executions and reports of heinous torture.

The government has been accused of promoting a Hans mass migration to Xinjiang to dilute the natives’ proportion from 90 per cent of the population in 1949, to almost 45 per cent today.

The regime now “manufactures consent” (weirdly, a Chomskian term usually reserved for Western imperialists) of its people for these extreme measures against the Muslims of Xinjiang, by citing ‘Islamic terrorism’ against the Hans in the province.

Also read: Breaking up with China?

Ultimately, the Chinese government’s greatest feat is to have its President sit beamingly in the same room as the Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, without ‘Uighur’ creeping into conversation.

More impressive still, is the capacity of the Pakistani political leaders, touting Islamic unity and decrying the oppression of Muslims wherever they may be, to ignore the Islamophobia raging in its most favoured state.

But that’s realpolitik. I’m more curious about how this information would be processed by an average Pakistani social media user, incensed by the anti-Muslim bigotry across Europe.

At the end, I suppose I’m just hoping we’d all get to hear our Prime Minister’s next passionate speech on Sino-Pak friendship over the sound of the invisible elephant blaring in the room.
 
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Very discouraging news from China.

Just propaganda to try to drive a wedge between Chinese and Muslims. Don't fall for it.

Islamophobia among Chinese and Sinophobia (did I just create the term?) among Muslims is always going to be very limited because there's no historical bad blood between the two civilizations.

Besides there are racists/fanatics everywhere. (In India though, persecution of Muslims is state sponsored.)
 
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Having talked with Chinese friends face to face, there are a few recurring themes for the root cause of their concerns:

1. If you type 'Islam killing' on Google, you find literally thousands of pages alleging Islam supports all kinds of violence. In the words of a Chinese friend "Just type 'Islam killing' on Google and see what comes up." And they don't find any authentic page which comprehensively disproves the false allegations.

2. The concept of an interminable Jihad that goes on until the flag of Islam is solidly planted upon all of Earth is highly disconcerting to them. My friend couldn't believe when I affirmed this. She had to reconfirm just to be sure. When I said Islam is the only system that guarantees fairness for all, and it is the moral duty of Muslims to extend the benefits of this justice everywhere she was speechless. Then I explained that even before war Islam gives the option to become a protectorate by paying a tax and this means if an enemy attacks Muslim blood gets spent first before non-Muslim blood she was just at a loss of words. She couldn't come up with any argument after that.

The hate is basically based on misinformation and us Muslims are to be blamed for leaving people in the dark about our true religion.
 
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kashmir is a democratically elected state government with 80 percent areas under curfew, 700k soldiers for 3.5 million people, 500k missing, mass graves of tousands found, 10k blinded, 94k+ killed by security forces since 90s(as per UN).
And you are comparing all those crimes to permission for fasting. If kashmir is a democratic state then why not allow UN members there to see the happy lives of kashmiris under democracy. Even your Ex chief minister IOK now supports freedom fighters.

about fasting. China allowed Pakistani fact finding mission and we had seen and exposed anti china powers propaganda.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1268006
https://tribune.com.pk/story/113257...kistan-team-probe-reported-china-fasting-ban/
https://tribune.com.pk/story/1134434/no-evidence-ban-fasting-xinjiang-clerics/
 
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