TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Authorities in China’s western Xinjiang region have systematically replaced the names of villages inhabited by Uighurs and other ethnic minorities to reflect the ruling Communist Party’s ideology, part of an attack on their cultural identity, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday.
According to the group’s report, prepared in collaboration with Norway-based organization Uyghur Hjelp, the names of about 630 villages in Xinjiang have been changed to remove references to Islam or the culture and history of the Uighurs.
The report compared the names of 25,000 Xinjiang villages as listed by the National Bureau of Statistics of China between 2009 and 2023.
Words such as ‘dutar’, a traditional Uyghur stringed instrument, or ‘mazar’, a shrine, have been removed from village names and replaced with words such as ‘happiness’, ‘unity’ and ‘harmony’ – often generic terms. found in Communist Party policy documents.
China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to faxed questions about the report and policies in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is a vast region bordering Kazakhstan and home to approximately 11 million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. In 2017, the Chinese government launched an assimilation campaign that included mass detentions, alleged political indoctrination, alleged family separations and alleged forced labor.
As part of the crackdown, an estimated more than 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities were detained in extralegal internment camps. The Chinese government at the time described the camps as “vocational training centers” and said they were needed to curb separatism and religious extremism.
The UN Human Rights Office in 2022 found allegations of rights abuses in Xinjiang “credible” and said China may have committed crimes against humanity in the region.
The changes to the names of villages in ‘baxshi’. a shaman.
References to Uighur history or to regional leaders before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 have also been removed, according to the report.
“Chinese authorities have changed hundreds of village names in Xinjiang from names with rich meaning for Uyghurs to names that reflect government propaganda,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch. “These name changes appear to be part of the Chinese government’s efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uighurs.”
The Chinese government wants to “erase people’s historical memory because those names remind people of who they are,” said Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur linguist based in Norway and founder of Uyghur Hjelp.
Most of the changes in village names took place between 2017 and 2019, at the height of the government crackdown in Xinjiang, the report said.
