China accused of erasing religion, culture from Uighur village names

Rights groups’ analysis of official data from 2009-2023 shows some 630 villages in Xinjiang had their names changed in this way.

China has “systematically” changed the names of hundreds of villages with religious, historical, or cultural meaning for Uighurs to names that resonate with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch.

The rights group, working in partnership with Norwegian advocacy organisation Uyghur Hjelp, said it identified 630 villages in the far western region of Xinjiang whose names had been changed in this way by scraping data from 2009 to 2023 on the website of the National Bureau of Statistics of China. The most common replacements were Happiness, Unity, and Harmony.

“The Chinese authorities have been changing hundreds of village names in Xinjiang from those rich in meaning for Uyghurs to those that reflect government propaganda,” Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement accompanying the report on Wednesday. “These name changes appear part of Chinese government efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uyghurs.”

China’s policies in Xinjiang drew international attention in 2018 when the United Nations said that at least one million mostly Muslim Uighurs and other Turkic minorities were being held in a network of re-education centres. Beijing said the camps were vocational training centres teaching Mandarin and other skills necessary to tackle “extremism” and prevent “terrorism“.

Leaks of official government documents, investigations by human rights groups and academics, as well as testimony from Uighurs themselves revealed Uighurs had also been targeted in other alleged abuses from forced sterilisation to family separation and targeting of religious beliefs and traditions.