The rights groups’ analysis of official data from 2009 to 2023 shows that some 630 villages in Xinjiang have had their names changed in this way.
China has “systematically” changed the names of hundreds of villages with religious, historical or cultural significance to Uyghurs 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 organization Uyghur Hjelp, said it had identified 630 villages in the far-western Xinjiang region whose names had been changed in this way by scraping data from 2009 to 2023 on the National Bureau of Statistics website. from China. The most common replacements were Happiness, Unity, and Harmony.
“Chinese authorities have changed hundreds of village names in Xinjiang from those that have important meaning to Uighurs to those that reflect government propaganda,” Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights, said Wednesday. Watch, in a press release accompanying the report. “These name changes appear to be part of the Chinese government’s efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uyghurs. »
China’s policy in Xinjiang attracted international attention in 2018 when the United Nations said at least one million people, mostly Muslims, Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities were detained in a network of re-education centers. Beijing said the camps were vocational training centers teaching Mandarin and other skills needed to combat “extremism” and prevent “terrorism“.
Official leaks government documentsInvestigations by human rights groups and academics, as well as testimonies from Uyghurs themselves, found that Uyghurs had also been targets of other alleged abuses, ranging from forced sterilization to separation from their families. families and targeting religious beliefs and traditions.
The latest Human Rights Watch report says most village name changes took place between 2017 and 2019 – at the height of the crackdown – and ensures references to Uyghur history, including the names of its kingdoms, republics and local rulers before the People’s Republic of China. was created in 1949, were abolished. Village names were also changed if they involved terms evoking Uyghur cultural practices, such as mazar (shrine) and dutar (a two-stringed lute).
Examples cited in the report include the village of Qutpidin Mazar in Kashgar, which was originally named for a shrine to the 13th-century Persian mathematician and poet Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, but which became known as Rose Flower Village in 2018. Dutar Village in Karakax County was renamed Red Flag Village in 2022.
Uyghur Hjelp interviewed 11 Uighurs who lived in villages whose names had been changed and found that the experience had a profound effect on them. One villager told the group that she had difficulty returning home after being released from a re-education camp because the name of the village she knew was no longer included in the ticketing system. Another villager told Uyghur Hjelp that he had written a poem and commissioned a song in memory of the now-lost places where he had once lived.
Michelle Bachelet, then the UN human rights chief, requested access to Xinjiang when details of the re-education camps were first revealed.
She was eventually allowed to surrender in 2022 and concluded that “serious human rights violations” had been committed and that the scale of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups… “could constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity“.
Abduweli Ayup, founder of the Uyghur Hjelp, urged international governments to do more to pressure China over the situation in Xinjiang, where he said hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs remain “unjustly imprisoned”.
“Relevant governments and the UN human rights office should intensify their efforts to hold the Chinese government accountable for its abuses in the Uyghur region,” he said in the statement.
