The People’s Republic of China (PRC) changed the names of about 630 Uyghur villages as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) campaign to stamp out ethnic diversity in Xinjiang, a human rights group found.
The CCP aims “to erase the cultural and religious expression” of the more than 11 million predominantly Muslim Uyghurs living in the PRC’s far-western Xinjiang region, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a recent report. Officials replaced names that referenced Islam or Uyghur history with words that reflect party ideology.
“How these village names are being kind of erased and replaced shows how dystopian the whole project of the Chinese government in the Uyghur region is,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at HRW.
“It’s about repressing people and … the past, and erasing the future, and erasing what they can imagine as a possibility for their own children or grandchildren,” she said.
HRW and the Norway-based “Uyghur Hjelp” organization used the PRC’s National Bureau of Statistics website to analyze village names in Xinjiang.
They found 630 changes deemed religious, cultural or historical in nature. Most occurred between 2017 and 2019, when CCP repression escalated in the region, the report said.
For example, Aq Meschit, or “White Mosque,” a village in Akto county, was renamed Unity village in 2018.
The same year, Hoja Eriq, or “Sufi Teacher’s Creek,” a village in Aksu Prefecture, was rechristened Willow village.
Dutar, a village named after a Uyghur musical instrument, in Hotan prefecture, was renamed Red Flag in 2022.
The CCP has used the village name changes with other tactics, including banning hijabs for women, beards for men and Muslim names for children, to try to wipe out Uyghur culture and to humiliate the ethnic group, Wang said.
“On a very fundamental level, erasing the symbols of people, the language and culture is about erasing who they are and teaching them to fear,” she said.
Human rights advocates also have documented the PRC’s rights abuses and crimes against humanity involving the detention of an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic people in “re-education” camps. The systematic attack on the population has included torture, forced labor, sexual violence and the forced sterilization of women, Wang said.
Campaign for Uyghurs, a Washington-based Uyghur advocacy group, condemned the village name changes.
“The names, which have now been changed to empty CCP slogans, once reflected our long history and rich culture and have been in our homeland for hundreds of years,” said Rushan Abbas, the group’s executive director.
“Although the CCP appears to celebrate Uyghur culture by showcasing elements like our music and dance, these displays are nothing but hollow propaganda masking the regime’s ongoing and systematic suppression of cultural and religious expression,” Abbas said.
