Put patriotism first, China tells its Muslims

Beijing

The Chinese Communist Party’s top leader in charge of religious affairs has called on the country’s Islamic associations and Muslim communities to “maintain the correct political direction” and “uphold the banner of patriotism”.

Wang Yang, the fourth-ranking member of the party’s top Politburo Standing Committee, who heads the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, in a meeting with the official China Islamic Association “called for full implementation of the Party’s basic policy on religious affairs and efforts to rally Islamic figures and Muslims closely around the Party and the government,” State media reported.

He also called on the association’s new leadership “to maintain the correct political direction, uphold the banner of patriotism and socialism, further strengthen the Chinese orientation in developing Islam in China, and facilitate the adaptation of Islam in China to socialist society.”

His comments came weeks after an August 31 report released by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said China had committed “serious human rights violations” against its Uighur Muslim minority in the western Xinjiang region.

The report said the “extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups”, referring to a network of reeducation centres built by China in the past five years which the government has called “vocational training” institutions, “may constitute… crimes against humanity”.

China slammed the report as “a patchwork of disinformation that serves as a political tool for the U.S. and some Western forces to strategically use Xinjiang to contain China”. “The fact that this assessment, despite its illegality and zero credibility, did not go so far as to play up false allegations such as ‘genocide’, ‘forced labour’, ‘religious oppression’ and ‘forced sterilisation’ shows that the lies of the century concocted by the U.S. and some Western forces have already collapsed,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said.

Most Muslim countries have kept a studied silence on Xinjiang, as has the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which has often criticised India over Kashmir.