China: Hundreds of Uighur Villages Renamed

(New York) – Chinese Xinjiang authorities have systematically changed the names of hundreds of villages with religious, historical or cultural significance. Uighur Human Rights Watch said today that the name should be changed to one that reflects the recent ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

Human Rights Watch research found that about 630 villages had their names changed in this way. The three most common replacement village names were “Happiness,” “Unity,” and “Harmony.”

“Chinese authorities have changed the names of hundreds of villages in Xinjiang from those that have rich meanings for Uighurs to those that reflect government propaganda,” Virtual currency“These name changes appear to be part of the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Uighur culture and religious expression.”

Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian organization Uyghur Help conducted a joint study, collecting the names of villages in Xinjiang from 2009 to 2023 from the website of China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

During this period, the names of about 3,600 of Xinjiang’s 25,000 villages changed. About four-fifths of these changes appeared to be ordinary changes, such as a change in number or a correction of a previously misspelled name. But about one-fifth of the names of 630 villages involved changes of a religious, cultural or historical nature.

These changes fall into three main categories. Any reference to religion (including Islamic terms), e.g. An argument (Hoja) is the title of a Sufi religious teacher. nose The Hanika, a Sufi religious building, has been removed, along with shamanic records, e.g. Give (Bahāsh), a shaman.

Any reference to Uyghur history, including the names of Uyghur kingdoms, republics, and local leaders before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, as well as There (Orda), which means “palace,” Sudan (Suritan), and beg Political or honorific titles such as Bo Ke were also changed. Authorities also removed words from village names that reflected Uighur cultural customs, such as Mazar (Mazar), shrine, and Will be held Dutar is the core of Uyghur music culture.

While the village name change appears to be ongoing, most of the changes occur Between 2017 and 2019, the Chinese government Crimes against humanity The situation in the region continues to escalate, especially in Kashgar, Aksu and Hotan prefectures in southern Xinjiang where Uyghurs are concentrated.

Without access to Xinjiang, the impact of the village name changes on people’s lives is unclear. Uyghur Hejeerp interviewed 11 Uyghurs living in villages whose names had been changed and found that the experience had a profound impact on them. One villager had difficulty returning home after being released from a re-education camp because the ticketing system no longer included the name she knew. Later, she had more difficulty registering for government services because of the name change. Another villager said he wrote a poem and commissioned a song In memory of all the places he once lived that have disappeared.

Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China has signed but not yet ratified, states: “In States where ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, members of such minorities shall not be deprived of the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language.”

The United Nations Human Rights Committee, an independent expert body responsible for interpreting the Convention statement In the general comment it is stated that “the aim of protecting these rights is to ensure the survival and continued development of the cultural, religious and social identity of the minorities concerned, thereby enriching the fabric of society as a whole… These rights must be protected.”

In May 2014, the Chinese government launched a “special campaign to crack down on violent terrorism” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Since 2017, the Chinese government has carried out extensive and systematic attack Violence against Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. This includes mass arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor, sexual violence, and reproductive rights violations. Human Rights Watch 2021 Summarize These violations constitute crimes against humanity.

The Chinese government has been conflating everyday Uighur religious and cultural practices and expressions of their identity with violent extremism to justify violations of Uighur rights. In April 2017, the Chinese government issued the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Anti-Extremism Regulations, which prohibits “propagating religious fanaticism in the name of abnormality.” Authorities reportedly prohibit Dozens of names with religious connotations shared by Muslims around the world, such as Saddam and Medina, were banned on the grounds that they could “exaggerate religious fanaticism.”

In August 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report concluding that the Chinese government’s abuses in Xinjiang “may amount to international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” Human Rights Watch said that while foreign governments have condemned Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang and some countries have imposed targeted and other sanctions on Chinese government officials, institutions, and companies implicated in human rights violations, these responses fall short of reflecting the severity of Beijing’s abuses.

“Concerned governments and the UN human rights office should step up efforts to hold the Chinese government accountable for its abuses in Uyghur areas,” said Abduweli Ayub, founder of Uyghur Home. “They should use the upcoming UN Human Rights Council meeting and all high-level bilateral meetings to press Beijing to release the hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs who remain wrongfully imprisoned in the crackdown.”

See below for more details on the village name change.

Example of village name change

• Kupdin Maza Village in Kashgar, named after the tomb of Qutbuddin Shiraz, a 13th-century Persian scholar and poet, was renamed Rose Village in 2018;
• In Akto County, Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, Aq Meschit (“white mosque”) village was renamed Unity village in 2018;
• In Aksu Prefecture, Hoja Eriq (“Sufi teacher’s creek”) village was renamed Willow village in 2018;
• In Karakax County, Dutar village (Dutar Village), named after a Uyghur musical instrument, was renamed Red Flag village (Red Flag Village) in 2022.

A complete list of these village names is available upon request.

method

China’s National Bureau of Statistics publishes a list of “Statistical Region Codes,” where each village is represented by a 12-digit code. These numbers identify villages at China’s five administrative levels: province, city/state, county, township, and village. Overall, we identified 25,394 unique administrative codes in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) between 2009 and 2023 (the exact number fluctuates from year to year). Of these, 23,291 were villages.

To facilitate identification of renamed villages, we first removed the suffixes of village names that simply mean “village” because they may appear in different forms, such as “agricultural village” and “pastoral village”.

We found 3,652 village name changes between 2009 and 2023. About 1,254 of these involved Mandarin name changes (the village name changed, but both the previous and the next names were in Mandarin). Most of the Chinese name changes involved Mandarin changes, such as changing from “第一联” to “三联” Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.

Because there is no standard Mandarin transliteration scheme for the Uighur language, many villages use different Chinese transliterations every year. Human Rights Watch used “edit distance”—an algorithm that calculates the similarity of a name before and after the change—to remove different Chinese transliterations of the same Uighur name.

Of the remaining approximately 1,000 place name changes, most were from Uyghur to Chinese, but some were Uyghur both before and after, and a few were from Mandarin to Uyghur. Of these 1,000 place name changes, approximately 350 were similarly benign changes, such as the change from Qumchi Östeng (“Sandy Canal”) village to Jigdelik (“Place of Date Trees”) village.

But about 630 of the name changes involved removing religious, historical or Uighur cultural terms and replacing them with generic names or names that conform to Chinese Communist Party ideology.

data analysis

Certain words are more likely to be removed from village names. In 2009, there were 47 villages in Xinjiang with “Mazar” (Shrine); all but six villages have removed the word from their names.An argumentIn 2016, the word “religious teacher” appeared in 28 village names, but by 2023, only 3 village names remained. Ten of the 13 village names in Xinjiang contain “religious teacher”.nose”, meaning Sufi meeting house, has renamed these villages. Now there are no more villages with “Sherpe” or”Khalifa” (ruler)’s name.

Table 1: Changes in village names according to specific words

There are 69 villages named “Happiness”, 55 villages named “Unity”, 38 villages named “Harmony”, 38 villages named “Bostan”, which means “Oasis” in Uyghur, and 38 villages named “Brightness”. For example, Xuelepeierik Village in Aksu Prefecture, which means “Ruler Creek” in Uyghur, was renamed “Unity New Village” in 2017; Mazawusden Village in Hotan Prefecture, which means “Temple Channel Village” in Uyghur, was renamed “Bright Village” in 2020.

Table 2: Most common substitutions in village names