Chinese focus on extremists
Police give tips on how to spot them
BEIJING — Authorities in China’s restive western province of Xinjiang have reacted to a growing threat of separatist and Islamist violence by banning women from wearing burkas in public in the regional capital.
But covering one’s face with a veil is just one of many ways Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang risk coming under official suspicion and being arrested.
On Friday, police in the province issued a list of 75 “specific signs” that might indicate a Uighur was a “religious extremist.”
The list included many predictable items, from reading extremist websites and sharing radical materials to wearing veils, reading religious books or abstaining from alcohol. But they offered some things the casual observer might otherwise not notice as a sign of dangerous radicalism.
Selling land, sheep or oxen without cause, for example, could be a sign, for the
“IT IS A FORM OF RACIAL PROFILING, AND THE END RESULT IS TO PUSH PEOPLE TO RESIST.”
JAMES LEIBOLD
appropriately alert policeman, that someone might be planning a suicide attack. Storing a large quantity of food at home should also arouse suspicion, as well as having secret chambers or tunnels in the house, the police in Jinghe County said on their WeChat social media account.
Attending religious activities in a neighbouring district, having many beds in the house, and having strangers visit “secretively” are listed as potentially suspicious.
Item 33, for example, cites “buying or storing dumbbells, barbells, boxing gloves and maps, compasses, binoculars, ropes, tents etc., without cause” as potentially problematic. Item 60 tells police to watch out for anyone who “openly chases, abuses or threatens people who dress fashionably.”
China’s iron rule in Xinjiang has fuelled a long-running separatist insurgency, which has turned increasingly violent during the past year and seems to have taken on an increasingly Islamist tinge. The more the violence escalates, the harder the Chinese authorities have tried to force people to abandon conservative forms of Islam, or indeed abandon Islam entirely, with government employees and young people banned from even attending mosques or observing the Ramadan fast. They have intensified surveillance of Uighurs in an attempt to identify radicals, with widespread house-tohouse searches being carried out.
The burka ban, announced Thursday in Urumqi, appeared to be an extension and intensification of a longrunning campaign, known as Project Beauty, which has tried to force Uighur women not to wear face-covering veils and men not to wear long beards. Critics say the government’s campaign is heavy handed and potentially counterproductive, giving police more reasons to detain Uighurs on flimsy pretexts and breeding more resentment.
“It is a form of racial profiling, and the end result is to push people to resist,” said James Leibold, an expert on China’s ethnic policies at Melbourne’s La Trobe University.
Leibold said women in Xinjiang wear burkas and veils for many reasons, including because they are symbols of a transnational Muslim identity, because they are popular, or because their husbands ask them to.