Mixed reactions to Ningxia’s hiring of Muslim civil servants

The hiring by the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region government of a “disproportionately high” number of Muslim civil servants received mix reactions in China.

Among the new government staffers hired in Ningxia in 2017, 45.8 percent of them are from the Hui ethnic minority group, who are predominantly Muslim, according to a document issued by Ningxia’s government last week.

Previously, Hui people could get 10 extra points during recruitment, but the policy has changed since 2018 and all ethnic minority candidates can get five extra points in the recruitment, it said.

Many netizens criticized the Ningxia government after Xi Wuyi, an expert on Marxism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, posted a screenshot of the document on her Sina Weibo.

Many said the number of Muslim civil servants is “disproportionately high” because it exceeds the group’s ratio of the region’s whole population. Many said that the pan-Islam tendency has risen to the political level in Ningxia.

In 2016, Hui people accounted for 36.18 percent of the region’s population, the Ningxia government document said.

Although China has no rule on the ratio of ethnic minority officials in governments, it does encourage regions with a dense population of ethnic minorities to hire more ethnic officials, because that helps these groups get more involved in local governance, Shen Guiping, a religious studies expert at the Central Institute of Socialism, told the Global Times on Thursday.

In 2014, the government head or Party chief of around 63 percent of cities and counties in Ningxia were Hui people, who played a significant role in promoting ethnic unity and development, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Yet Shen said that most such places failed to achieve the goal. “Because some people from the ethnic minority groups live in rural areas and are less educated,” she noted.