>>84527>why do Chinese repress the Muslim minority in its west?
Beijing represses
every non-state association and
every collective identity besides "citizen of the PRC", or subdues it to the point of it becoming an entirely state-puppeteered farce deprived of all agency.
I think the level of repression depends on who the Party deems you to be, and in some cases also on where you are. Smaller non-muslim rural ethnic minorities tend to get reduced to the role of docile, simple but happy people providing colourful background to propaganda and exoticism to Chinese tourists [0]. It's different with identity groups that are sufficiently large and poorly integrated to be classified as a collective potential threat. Imagine you are a young male member of a sizeable group that lives largely separate from the Hàn, you communicate among yourselves in a language they cannot understand, and some members of your group have recently been implicated in violence against Hàn.
The Manchus are probably too integrated and invested in larger Hàn society to be a fertile ground for separatism, except of course for the odd wewuzzer (
>>79221). They are a minority in much of their heartland [1] and – after peaceful self-Sinicization while they dominated China – no longer cause suspicion by speaking a language among themselves that state agents might not understand.
The Mongol problem has been largely solved by reducing their numbers. Anti-Mongol massacres were perpetrated not only in the late 1960s by our dear business partner and slave labour provider the Chinese Communists [2], but notably also
against the state in 1891 [3], when the balance of power between Hàn and the Mongols was more favourable to the latter than in later times to say the least, and the anti-Mongol rebellion was consequently crushed by the Qing state. More recently, the Hàn by their sheer numbers have made the Mongols a minority on their own clay [4] through migration instead of massacres. Note that there is little to no incentive for Hàn immigrant schoolchildren to learn a local non-Hàn language (it's certainly not compulsory, and I think usually not even possible), but schools do force everyone to learn Hàn language.
I don't know much about Tibetans in Tibet AR, in Qinghai and in Sichuan, other than some of them apparently see the mass Hàn immigration to Lhasa as the beginning of the same
Umvolkung scenario that has played out in Inner Mongolia, and that there are places off limits to foreign journalists.
Now to Muslim minorities: At least outside of Xinjiang, I don't think Huí (Hàn-speaking ethnic muslims who don't officially count as Hàn) have to swallow much more shit from the state than their Hàn neighbours, but Uyghurs probably do. In other words, I think what's happening is not so much Chinese repressing all ethnic muslims as such, but rather the CPC making sure that all religious activity (not limited to what passes for Islam in China) is state-controlled and 100% apolitical (or pro-CPC; and the CPC being very inclusive in what they deem political), and the Party giving
Uyghurs in particular special treatment all across China. I think that not only is there
way more mutual hate between Uyghurs and Hàn than between other ethnic Muslim minorities and Hàn (both inside and outside of Xinjiang), but also that things are different in Xinjiang Uyghur AR compared to, say, Ningxia Hui AR or Qinghai. The two main reasons for this are probably that, partly as an effect of the Dzungar genocide of the 1750s, Xinjiang today has by far the highest percentage of Muslims, despite Hàn colonization of rural parts through the
Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC; does anything similar exist elsewhere in China?) since the 1950s, and that there has been mob violence (by Uyghurs and by Hàn, against each other) and other terrorism (apart of course from the state terrorizing its subjects, business as usual). I think no Chinese region has seen harsher measures than Xinjiang with the CPC shutting down communication [5] and allegedly denying all Xinjiang Uyghurs permission to leave the PRC after the riots (and to this day?).
Other minorities are smaller both in absolute and in relative numbers, and hence easier to subdue. Uyghurs are more numerous, inhabit a huge territory, and outnumber Hàn in many places. Compare this to the situation of many ethnic groups elsewhere in China which are so small or so scattered that Ürümqi-style ethnic mob violence would have technically been hardly possible.
Note how English Wikipedia [6] lists many "terrorist attacks" in China ascribed to Uyghurs, but (as far as I've skimmed) none ascribed to Huí or other Muslim minorities from Xinjiang or elsewhere in China – although, to be fair, Xinjiang's Uyghur population vastly outnumbers other ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang so this may be expected. I can't remember if I've ever read about ethnic clashes involving any groups other than Uyghurs, Tibetans or Mongols on one side and Hàn on the other in the PRC.
The CPC's measures against Islamist "terrorists" (in the 21st century; it was "splittists" in the 20th century) is of course
de facto a crackdown on all things considered Islamic. Old women are (or were?) no longer allowed to wear their traditional headscarves. You have probably seen the beards verboten poster, which probably only applies to people who are suspicious on account of being born in the wrong time, place, and ethnicity – I doubt that a single Hàn living in the eastern half of China will get into similar trouble for having a beard. If your question was about such rules, i can only guess why they are that way. Qing China's queue law comes to mind: Shaving one's beard and not wearing a headscarf could be plegdes of allegiance to the
Zhonghua minzu, ways to wear one's submission on one's body for all to see (not least the surveillance cameras [7]), also similar to what some people in the West say about sheeple like me who wear a medical mask.
Curiously, there is also discrimination against the Hàn majority: I think official members of ethnic minorities were allowed more children than Hàn (but see [8]) and still get easier access to higher education than Hàn, which I think has somewhat diminished the prestige of minority-held academic degrees as a side effect (imagine HR thinking: "She's an official member of an ethnic minority, so maybe the reason she got into university wasn't that she's smart…"). And historically, Hàn have of course themselves suffered ethnically motivated violence when under non-Hàn domination, such as when they were massacred during invasions and rebellions. I'll stop here, enjoy your goji berries.
[0]
https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/pdf/11283[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuang_Guandong[2]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Säuberung_der_Inneren_Mongolei[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindandao_incident[4] Inner Mongolia AR as a whole: 17 percent Mongols. Hohhot, its administrative centre: 10 percent Mongols. Baotou, its largest city: 2.3 percent Mongols.
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_Ürümqi_riots#Public_services_and_Internet_access[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China#Chronology_of_major_events[7] pp. 2–25 of
https://archiv.reporter-forum.de/fileadmin/pdf/Reporterpreis_2019/RP19_Reader_Sieger.pdf (in German; “best
Reportage of 2019”, by Harald Maass)
[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Xinjiang
>>84527>why do Chinese repress the Muslim minority in its west?
Beijing represses
every non-state association and
every collective identity besides "citizen of the PRC", or subdues it to the point of it becoming an entirely state-puppeteered farce deprived of all agency.
I think the level of repression depends on who the Party deems you to be, and in some cases also on where you are. Smaller non-muslim rural ethnic minorities tend to get reduced to the role of docile, simple but happy people providing colourful background to propaganda and exoticism to Chinese tourists [0]. It's different with identity groups that are sufficiently large and poorly integrated to be classified as a collective potential threat. Imagine you are a young male member of a sizeable group that lives largely separate from the Hàn, you communicate among yourselves in a language they cannot understand, and some members of your group have recently been implicated in violence against Hàn.
The Manchus are probably too integrated and invested in larger Hàn society to be a fertile ground for separatism, except of course for the odd wewuzzer (
>>79221). They are a minority in much of their heartland [1] and – after peaceful self-Sinicization while they dominated China – no longer cause suspicion by speaking a language among themselves that state agents might not understand.
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