China restricted Ramadan for Uighur Muslims

At a teachers college in far northwestern China, students were irritated to find that their professors were escorting them to lunch last month — an odd occurrence since they were more than capable of finding the cafeteria themselves.

There was an ulterior motive, students told travelers who recently visited the city of Kashgar: The college wanted to make sure that the students, most of them Muslims, were eating rather than fasting in daylight hours during the holy month of Ramadan.

Then, something even stranger happened, the students said. When Ramadan ended late last month, launching the three-day Eid al-Fitr feast, all the restaurants and the cafeteria on campus were shut down. Students were barred from leaving the campus. On the next two days of the holiday, the cafeteria was open, but the students were locked in, unable to leave to celebrate with their families.

“It was totally backwards,” complained a 20-year-old Muslim student who was forced to skip the holiday.

In the aftermath of violent protests this year by Uighurs, the ethnic Turkic and Muslim minority living in northwestern China, authorities have deepened their campaign against religious practices — particularly during Ramadan.

For years, China has restricted observance of Ramadan for Communist Party members and government cadres. On one website for an agricultural bureau, for instance, employees were reminded “not to practice any religion, not to attend religious events and not to fast.”

This year, the local Communist Party also ordered restaurants to remain open during the day, even though chefs and most of their potential customers were fasting. Failure to keep their doors open made restaurants subject to fines of up to $780, the equivalent of several months’ salary.

So restaurateurs made token gestures, assigning one waiter to sit in the doorway and a chef to make a single dish that would be either eaten cold at night or discarded.

In Kashgar, across from the Id Kah Mosque, the largest in China, travelers described a bored teenage waiter in a Muslim skullcap sitting in the doorway of a darkened restaurant looking out onto the dusty sidewalk as if waiting for the customers he knew wouldn’t come.

Along the entire strip, restaurants were similarly unlit and empty, with none of the usual smells of roasting lamb wafting from the kitchens.

“They just offer what they can to avoid trouble,” said a doctor in his late 20s, who asked not to be quoted by name for fear of retaliation. He described the compromise at one of his favorite restaurants, where the chef made only rice pilaf. “The chefs can’t even taste the food to make sure it is delicious.”

The policy extended deeper into Xinjiang province than just Kashgar. In Aksu, 250 miles to the northeast, the municipal website warned that restaurant owners “who close without reason during the ‘Ramadan period’ will be severely dealt with according to the relevant regulations.”

Residents of Xinjiang province say that Chinese policies regarding Ramadan have become steadily more draconian over the years.

“It has been bad since 1993 and it is getting worse,” said Tursun Ghupur, 33, who comes from Kashgar but has been living in Beijing. “Usually for ordinary people it is OK. You can pray and you can observe Ramadan. But if you go to school and have a job with the government, you can’t be religious.”

Political scientists say the government’s strategy is likely to backfire.

“Particularly with the government crackdown on religion in Xinjiang, this has made more people see religion as a form of resistance rather than personal piety,” said Dru Gladney, a professor of anthropology at Pomona College specializing in Central Asia. “From the authorities’ standpoint, it’s really counterproductive.”

In recent months, Xinjiang has witnessed the deadliest ethnic violence since huge riots in the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2009. On the last weekend in July, the eve of Ramadan, Uighur protesters staged a series of ambushes directed against Chinese authorities, leaving 22 people dead.

At the very least, the restrictions on Ramadan undermine personal relations between Uighurs and Han Chinese.

The Kashgar doctor related an incident involving his nephew, a student at a junior high school. During the holiday, the boy was given a piece of candy by his teacher, who is Han Chinese.

“I’m doing well in school. The teacher likes me. She gave me candy,” the boy told his father late that day.

The father scoffed at the explanation. “She is only trying to tell if you’re fasting for Ramadan.”

Chinese Muslims banned from fasting in Ramadan

Amid fresh arrests, restrictions on fasting and prayers at mosques, Uighur Muslims are suffering under the latest episode of Chinese government crackdown on their ethnic minority in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

“If any religious figure discusses Ramadan during the course of religious activities, or encourages people to take part, then they will lose their license to practice,” Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the Munich-based World Uighur Congress, told Eurasia Review on Friday, August 5.

“The more serious cases will result in arrests for incitement to engage in illegal religious activity,” he said.

A day before the start of the holy fasting month for China’s Muslims, at least 11 people were killed in a series of attacks in the north-western region of Xinjiang.

Chinese authorities blamed the attacks to the ethnic minority, after which the Chinese police shot dead two Muslims last Sunday.

The attacks came less than two weeks after 18 people were killed in an attack in the restive Xinjiang region.

Following the unrest, more than 100 uighurs were detained by Chinese authorities.

Most of those detained as suspects were committed Muslims who attended mosque and whose wives wore veils, residents say.

Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, was the scene of deadly violence in July 2009 when the mainly Muslim Uighur minority vented resentment over Chinese restrictions in the region.

In the following days, mobs of angry Han took to the streets looking for revenge in the worst ethnic violence that China had seen in decades.

The unrest left nearly 200 dead and 1,700 injured, according to government figures. But Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, say the toll was much higher and mainly from their community.

China’s authorities have convicted about 200 people, mostly Uighurs, over the riots and sentenced 26 of them to death.

No Fasting

Beijing slapped severe restrictions on Chinese Muslims as the holy fasting month of Ramadan started.

As for Muslim members of the government throughout Xinjiang, the government forced them to sign “letters of responsibility” promising to avoid fasting, evening prayers, or other religious activities.

“Fasting during Ramadan is a traditional ethnic custom, and they are allowed to do that,” an employee who answered the phone at a local government neighborhood committee office in the regional capital Urumqi said confirming the restrictions.

“But they aren’t allowed to hold any religious activities during Ramadan,” she added.

“Party members are not allowed to fast for Ramadan, and neither are civil servants.”

As for private companies, Uighur Muslim employees were offered lunches during fasting hours.

Anyone who refuses to eat could lose their annual bonus, or even their job, Raxit added.

Officials have also targeted Muslim schoolchildren, providing them with free lunches during the fasting period.

A Uighur resident of Beijing said students under 18 are forbidden from fasting during Ramadan. Moreover, government campaigns forced restaurants in the Muslim majority region to stay open all day.

More restrictions were also imposed on people trying to attend prayers at mosques.

Everyone attending prayers has to register with their national identity card, he added.

“They have to register,” he said.

“[After prayers] they aren’t allowed to [congregate and] talk to each other.”

In Ramadan, adult Muslims abstain from food, drink, smoking and sex between dawn and sunset.

The sick and those traveling are exempt from fasting especially if it poses health risks.

Muslims dedicate their time during the holy month to be closer to Allah through prayers, self-restraint and good deeds.

China Drone threat highlights new Global arms race

China’s acknowledgment earlier this week that it considered using a drone strike on foreign soil to target a major Burmese drug trafficker wanted in the killings of 13 Chinese sailors highlights Beijing’s increasing capacity in unmanned aerial warfare.  It also foreshadows the dangers of a burgeoning global drone race.

Liu Yuejin, director of the Public Security Ministry’s anti-drug bureau, told the state-run Global Timesnewspaper Monday the plan called for bombing drug lord Naw Kham’s mountain hideout in northeastern Burma using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to end a months-long manhunt.

China’s top drug tsar told the newspaper the drone strike option was eventually passed over to try to capture Naw Kham alive, which finally occurred last April in a joint Chinese-Laotian operation.  But his comments reveal that China is weighing targeting killings seriously.

Beijing is becoming more willing to project power outside China, moving away from its previous policy of non-interference in international affairs, according to Peter Dutton, director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

“This is a new change.  This is China behaving more actively in the international sphere to protect its interests beyond its borders than it had in the past,” Dutton said.

Previously, China would have insisted that such interventions “either [take place] in international waters, or have United Nations approval,” he said.

Legal ambiguity

For years, the United States, Israel and Britain have dominated the global drone market, and the U.S. is known to have launched armed UAV strikes against foreign targets.

But China has vastly improved its technology of late, unveiling large numbers of new drone models at recent air shows and modernizing its global navigation system, Beidou, to compete with the U.S. Global Positioning System as well as Russian and EU rivals.

The Obama administration has justified drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia by claiming those governments were “unwilling or unable to suppress the threat posed by the individual being targeted,” according to a recently leaked Justice Department memo.  The leaked “white paper” outlines legal arguments for using drone aircraft to target and kill American citizens abroad who are considered terrorists.

American University Law Professor Stephen Vladeck says Washington needs to be much more specific about its criteria for using armed UAVs, because China and other countries are paying close attention.

“Part of the problem is that because the U.S. government is engaged in what seems like so many drone strikes, and has not exactly been forthcoming about the criteria it uses, it’s possible for countries like China to point at the U.S. example and say, ‘if they’re doing it, so can we,’” Vladeck said.

Proliferation and demand

Another issue is proliferation and skyrocketing demand.  While the United States has traditionally exported unmanned drones to only a few of its closest allies, Chinese companies are now seen as an increasingly reliable and cheap supplier.

Dozens of countries have bought or built their own UAVs, primarily for surveillance, and military planners see them as extremely effective, both for reconnaissance and as weaponized attack vehicles.

“The problem is that this technology is becoming so widely available and so cheap, that I think it is only a matter of time before countries with far smaller militaries, countries with far less responsible regimes, are in a position where they want to use these technologies as well,” Vladeck said.

American military contractors have been lobbying the government to loosen export restrictions and tap into foreign markets for unmanned aircraft.

In 2010, U.S.-based General Atomics received approval to sell early, unarmed versions of the Predator drone to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries in the Middle East and Latin America.

Top drone exporter Israel has sold its aircraft to a variety of countries, including Nigeria, India and Russia.

Regional tension

One of the Chinese drones unveiled at the annual Zhuhai air show in November has a range of more than 3,200 kilometers, and the Japanese military recently documented an unmanned vehicle flying near some Chinese naval vessels on a training exercise near Okinawa.

With tensions heating up between the two countries over disputed islands in the South China Sea, Japanese media reports have indicated the new government in Tokyo wants to purchase a small number of advanced U.S. Global Hawk high-altitude surveillance drones.

While both sides claim the unmanned aircraft will be used for reconnaissance, experts warn adding armaments is relatively easy, and the possibility for regional drone clashes cannot be discounted.

Middle East chaos is a gift for China

Chaos in Libya reveals power lines that cut across the corrupt, complacent structures of the old Arab dictators.

Of all the unexpected events in the Middle East, none underlines the sense of a changing world order more clearly than the arrival of a Chinese warship in the Mediterranean. The 4,000-ton missile frigate Xuzhou is protecting an enormous programme of evacuation that has already moved 20,000 Chinese nationals out of Libya. Beijing is sending 15 aircraft a day for the next two weeks to fly them home from Malta, Crete and other locations.

The Xuzhou is heavily armed with missiles and, more worryingly, nicely positioned to eavesdrop on Nato powers. But no one can argue that China does not have an interest in the region; it has tens of thousands of workers in the Middle East and hundreds of thousands in Africa. Moreover, the price of oil is a matter of vital importance to a country intimately tied in to the global economy. If a fuel crisis sends the world economy into recession, the stability of China will be threatened; therefore Beijing is behaving as if it were part of the Middle East.

And, in a sense, it is. Until recently, the West has thought about globalisation chiefly in economic terms: specifically, the replacement of geographical trade networks by technological ones. Now we are seeing just how profoundly globalisation has changed geopolitical relationships. Chaos in Libya reveals power lines that cut across the corrupt, complacent structures of the old Arab dictators. China’s super-efficient evacuation of its people will reinforce its status in the region; likewise, the faltering performance of some Western powers – including Britain – displays their relative weakness, while the inability of sub-Saharan nations to rescue their workers highlights their economic helplessness.

Meanwhile, it comes as no surprise that non-Arab Iran has plunged into the middle of these Arab convulsions. Tehran has greeted what it calls the “Islamic awakening” – but is also using the crisis to sell more of its crude oil. Last week two Iranian navy ships passed through the Suez Canal en route to Syria, the first to do so since 1979. Given Iran’s links to Hezbollah, Israel is understandably alarmed.

Like China, with whom it has just signed a major oil deal, Iran worries about scenes of North African unrest and is blocking internet access. But both Beijing and Tehran are quietly satisfied by the way events in the Arab world have wrong-footed the West. America and Europe find themselves praising democratic movements in countries whose dictators they have been propping up. Their embarrassment is a gift to ruthless states that have never paid more than lip service to democracy and now sense a chance to reconfigure the Arab world in their own interests.

Ningxia vies for Muslim tourists

NORTH-west China’s Ningxia, the only provincial-level autonomous region in the country with a one-third ethnic Hui population, is keen to woo Muslim tourists from South-east Asia.

Xu Xiaoping, deputy director-general, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region Tourism Administration Bureau, said: “We have vast Islamic cultural and tourism resources that will appeal to South-east Asia’s Muslim travellers. Yinchuan Hedong Airport has special prayer rooms, halal cuisine is readily available (in the destination), and several hotels feature Mecca-direction signages, hence strongly positioning Ningxia as a Muslim tourism destination.”

Xu pointed out that the China-Arab States Economic and Trade Forum – launched in 2010 – has already increased awareness of Ningxia in the Middle East, which is why the bureau is now turning its attention to South-east Asia. He added that the bureau was working with Yinchuan Hedong Airport to invite carriers to launch flights between South-east Asia and the provincial capital.

The bureau conducted a presentation for Singapore and Malaysia tour operators at CITM 2012, showcasing its offerings including homestays with Muslim families and famed mosques.

China Sightseeing International Travel Service Ningxia’s general manager, An Ya Ping, said his company had seen a 20-25 per cent increase in Muslim travellers from South-east Asia over the past two years, with Malaysia, Indonesia and India as its biggest source markets in the region.

An also plans to launch more multi-province tours spanning Ningxia to Beijing, Qinghai and Xiamen, which also have significant Muslim presence.

Said An: “Muslim travellers are more at ease in Ningxia, which possesses closer cultural and religious affinities with Islamic nations than other parts of China. We often see repeat Muslim visitors as well as families who discover Ningxia by word of mouth.”