China Stresses Investment, Invokes New Zealand Massacre in Defending Treatment of Muslims

By Josh Chin (WSJ)

April 10, 2019 6:00 a.m. ET

Chinese authorities defend razing of Muslim neighborhoods and accuse critics of ‘slanderous fabrication’

BEIJING—Chinese authorities defended the razing of Muslim neighborhoods and the mass use of digital surveillance in the capital of China’s Xinjiang region, saying the measures are designed to promote development and security for locals.

The Xinjiang government’s information office, in written comments to The Wall Street Journal, denied that the government is using redevelopment of neighborhoods in Urumqi inhabited by ethnic Uighurs to impose new controls. It justified the installation of digital cameras at Urumqi’s more than 300 mosques by evoking last month’s mass shootings in New Zealand, saying the killings were a reminder of the need for more security at religious venues.

The comments from the Xinjiang government, sent by fax last Friday, came in response to questions first submitted by the Journal in February and then resubmitted a month later ahead of publication of a report about the multibillion-dollar redevelopment effort in Urumqi.

The Journal—citing former and current residents, satellite imagery and on-the-ground reporting—found that the program represents a new phase in the government’s campaign, after mass detentions, to assimilate the Turkic-speaking, mainly Muslim group. The Journal reported that the redevelopment has led to the bulldozing of neighborhoods housing Uighur migrants, the closing of Uighur businesses and the uprooting of other mainstays of Uighur life in the city.

Chinese leaders have struggled for decades to suffocate separatist sentiment in Xinjiang, a mountainous expanse abutting Central Asia that 12 million Uighurs—nearly half the region’s population—regard as their homeland.

In the government’s sweeping campaign in Xinjiang, some scholars and U.N. officials estimate that as many as a million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims have been corralled into a network of political indoctrination camps.

After locking up as many as a million people in camps in Xinjiang, Chinese authorities are destroying Uighur neighborhoods and purging the region's culture. They say they’re fighting terrorism. Their aim: to engineer a society loyal to Beijing. Photo illustration: Sharon Shi. Video: Clément Bürge

In its comments, the Xinjiang information office denied the existence of detention camps, which Chinese authorities have previously described as “vocational training centers” designed to help Uighurs integrate more easily into Chinese society. Instead, its responses focused on economic development in Urumqi.

It dismissed allegations from former residents that one goal of a $10 billion plan to demolish and redevelop the city’s shantytowns is to better control the city’s Uighur population. Instead, it said, the project is intended to improve poor living conditions in the neighborhoods and improve the city’s image.

“This argument that ‘shantytown redevelopment is intended to force some Uighur migrants to leave the city and place others in residential buildings that are easier to monitor’ is a slanderous fabrication,” it said.

The office laid out costs of some specific redevelopment projects: 34 million yuan ($5 million) for a pedestrian shopping street around the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar, in a section of downtown Urumqi that used to be the heart of Uighur commercial life; and 50 million yuan for a new commercial park dedicated to nan flatbread, a Uighur staple known as nang in Mandarin.

The young Uighur men who used to bake nang in streetside ovens have largely disappeared from Uruqmi, the Journal discovered on a visit to the city late last year. The Xinjiang information office said the Nang Culture Park, which opened on Christmas Day, employs more than 1,000 people, including Uighurs; it didn’t say whether any had been sent to the park from internment camps.

The office cited the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, to rebut concerns expressed by Uighur residents that surveillance systems at mosques were intended to identify believers to the police.

“The recent mass shooting in New Zealand that harmed so many innocent lives is a strong warning,” it said. “The goal of improving security at mosques is to protect the ability of the Muslim community to hold normal, orderly religious activities.”

Urumqi police use religious activity as a criteria in judging whether individual Uighurs are “safe” or “unsafe,” according to accounts from residents and a personal-data-collection form seen by the Journal. Uighur residents also report hiding or giving away copies of the Quran to avoid trouble during routine police searches of their homes.

Party leaders attribute ethnic tensions and sporadic violent attacks in Xinjiang to the influence of radical Islam. Uighur exiles and scholars say conflict stems from excessive policing, widespread discrimination and progressively tighter religious controls.

In its reporting, the Journal found that Urumqi recorded an unusual drop in population in 2017, the year after the current campaign began, and noted that the city had declined to publish a customary breakdown of the population by ethnic group.

In its statement, the Xinjiang information office said the proportion of Uighurs among people registered as hometown residents of Urumqi rose to 12.92% in 2018 from 12.53% in 2016. It didn’t provide a population figure and a percentage or figure for the larger “permanent resident” population, which includes people who have migrated to the city for work or study.

Pedestrians were noticeably sparse in Uighur neighborhoods when the Journal visited in November.

“It used to be shoulder-to-shoulder on some streets during the weekend,” one Uighur resident said. “Now the sidewalks feel empty.”

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Write to Josh Chin at josh.chin@wsj.com

Appeared in the April 11, 2019, print edition as 'China Defends the Razing Of Urumqi’s Muslim Areas.'