Analysis of official data for the period 2009-2023 by human rights groups shows that about 630 villages in Xinjiang were renamed in this way.
China has “systematically” changed the names of hundreds of villages with religious, historical or cultural significance to Uighurs to names that resonate with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch.
The human rights group, which works in partnership with Norwegian advocacy organization Uyghur Hjelp, said it identified 630 villages in the western Xinjiang region whose names had been changed in this way by mining data from 2009 to 2023 on the website of the National Statistics Office. from China. The most common replacements were Happiness, Unity, and Harmony.
“Chinese authorities have been changing hundreds of village names in Xinjiang, from those with rich meaning to Uyghurs to those that reflect government propaganda,” Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement accompanying to the report on Wednesday. “These name changes appear to be part of the Chinese government's efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of the Uyghurs.”
China's policies in Xinjiang attracted international attention in 2018 when the United Nations said at least one million mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities were being held in a network of re-education centers. Beijing said the camps were vocational training centers that taught Mandarin and other skills needed to tackle “extremism” and prevent “terrorism.”
Leaks of official government documents, investigations by human rights groups and academics, as well as testimonies from Uyghurs themselves, revealed that Uyghurs had also been subject to other alleged abuses, from forced sterilization to family separation. and attacks against religious beliefs and traditions.
The latest Human Rights Watch report said most of the village name changes took place between 2017 and 2019, the height of the crackdown, and claimed references to Uyghur history, including the names of their kingdoms, republics and local leaders before the People's Republic of China. was established in 1949, they were eliminated. Village names were also changed if they included terms suggesting Uyghur cultural practices, such as mazar (shrine) and dutar (a two-stringed lute).
Among the examples in the report is the village of Qutpidin Mazar in Kashgar, which was originally named after a shrine of the 13th-century Persian scholar and poet Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, but which became known as the village of Rose Flower in 2018. Meanwhile, Dutar Village in Karakax County was renamed Red Flag Village in 2022.
Uyghur Hjelp interviewed 11 Uyghurs living in villages whose names had been changed and found that the experience had had a profound effect on them. One villager told the group that she had difficulty returning home after being released from a re-education camp because the name of the village she knew was no longer included in the ticketing system. Another villager told Uyghur Hjelp that he had written a poem and commissioned a song in memory of the now-lost places where he once lived.
Then-UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet requested access to Xinjiang when details of the re-education camps first emerged.
He was finally allowed to visit the country in 2022 and concluded that “serious human rights violations” had been committed and that the magnitude of the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups… “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against The humanity”.
Abduweli Ayup, founder of Uyghur Hjelp, urged international governments to do more to pressure China over the situation in Xinjiang, where he said hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs remained “unjustly imprisoned.”
“Concerned governments and the UN human rights office should intensify their efforts to hold the Chinese government accountable for its abuses in the Uyghur region,” he said in the statement.
