Xinjiang Government Continues Restrictions on Mosque Attendance

Authorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have tightened controls over who may enter mosques, according to a February 6 Radio Free Asia (RFA) report. A photograph sent to RFA depicts a sign in front of a mosque in the southern part of the XUAR that forbids entry to five categories of people: Communist Party and Communist Youth members; state employees, workers, and retirees; minors under 18; local government employees; and women. According to RFA, an imam in Kashgar confirmed some of these restrictions and said that policies elsewhere are the same as at his mosque. A XUAR resident cited in the article said authorities monitor attendance at mosques and levy fines when people violate the bans.

RFA says the ban on women represents "the first time such gender restrictions have been alluded to." Other restrictions reflect longstanding policies to narrow the scope of who may engage in religious activities. Article 14 of the XUAR's 1993 Implementing Measures of the Law on the Protection of Minors says that "parents or other guardians may not permit minors to be engaged in religious activities." In their 2005 report Devastating Blows: Religious Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Human Rights in China (HRIC) report that neither the national Law on the Protection of Minors nor other provinces' implementing measures include such a provision. HRW and HRIC report that the ban's implementation appears to vary, but "Uighur Muslims report that the ban is implemented against them more harshly than against members of other ethnic or religious groups[.]" In the XUAR's 2000 "Interim Provisions on Disciplinary Punishments for Party Members and Organs that Violate Political Discipline in Fighting Separatism and Safeguarding Unity," cited in the HRW/HRIC report, article 18 includes the provision that "[p]ersons who have a strong religious belief and are eager to organize and participate in religious activities and who have refused to mend their ways despite repeated education ought to be persuaded to withdraw from the Party or be removed from the Party." Nationwide, the Communist Party recently reacted to estimates of a strong presence of religious practitioners within the Party through measures enforcing the Party's ban on religion, according to a November 8 article in The Epoch Times excerpted from the magazine Zhengming. While Party membership is not mandatory in China, it can further career opportunities and social advancement. The U.S. Department of State notes in its 2005 International Religious Freedom Report that "party membership is required for almost all high-level positions in government, state-owned businesses, and many official organizations."

The RFA article follows a report from an overseas Uighur group that authorities in the XUAR increased supervision of mosques in January as part of a month-long campaign against separatist activities. The East Turkistan Information Center (ETIC) reported that officials visited mosques before the Muslim holiday of Qurban (Eid al-Adha), which began on January 10, and instructed staff to disseminate patriotic messages, maintain a high degree of vigilance, and guard against people using the mosques to carry out separatist activities, according to a January 9 Epoch Times article.

In an interview in the Xinjiang Daily News, posted December 13 on Tianshan Net, Abliz Hoshur, Secretary General of the XUAR Party Committee’s Politics and Law Commission, stressed that while the state of public order in the XUAR was relatively stable, the region needed to continue fighting the "three forces" of separatism, terrorism, and religious extremism. The government reiterated the importance of battling the "three forces" the following month. Hoshur added that "illegal religious activity" in the region has gained ground to some extent. Experts on Islam in China note that definitions of this term are vague and applications of it can be arbitrary. One scholar has observed that "any religious activity deemed a threat in any way by the state can be defined...as illegal[.]" (See the CECC Roundtable on Practicing Islam in Today's China for these assessments.) Even official documents that enumerate acts which constitute illegal activity leave some wording vague, allowing wide latitude in determining which acts are illegal. In their report, HRW and HRIC observe that a manual for ethnic religious work in Urumqi provides a list that specifies which acts constitute illegal activity but also "contains catch-all 'offenses' that allow the authorities to deny religious freedom under virtually any pretext[.]"

Government bodies control Islamic practice throughout China and, as noted, place extra restrictions over Islamic practice in the XUAR, especially among Uighurs. The government has carried out the current crackdown on religion in the XUAR for over one and a half decades and has intensified it since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. For more information, see the sections on Rights Violations in Xinjiang and Religious Freedom for China's Muslims in the 2005 CECC Annual Report.