During the April 27 edition of “The Point with Liu Xin", a current affairs program on China’s state-run CGTN, ambassadors from Pakistan, Palestine, and Syria weighed in on the situation in Xinjiang.
The English-language program providing a corrective to Western politicians and media, accusing them of intentionally overlooking “the economic, social and cultural rights” that Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities “enjoy in the region.”
Of the three diplomats, two – Pakistani ambassador to China Moin ul Haque and Palestinian ambassador to China Fariz Mehdawi – went on Chinese Foreign Ministry-sponsored tours of Xinjiang, the Northwest region that is home to much of the Uyghur population the United States and others say is the target of persecution.
Xin’s leading questions stressed that ethnic minorities in the region are able to preserve their cultures and customs while coexisting with the Han Chinese minority there. Her guests agreed.
Ul Haque described Xinjiang as a place of ethnic harmony and diversity, where languages and cultures are being preserved. Mehdawi touted the region’s religious freedom, even joking there are “too many” mosques in Xinjiang.
“You know, the average of mosques, if you have to calculate it all, it’s something like 2,000 inhabitants for one mosque. This ratio we don’t have it in our country. It’s not available anywhere,” Mehdawi said.
“Of course those mosques have been built a long time ago, which have been very well maintained … [The mosques are] accessible the whole day and night, actually. Some of them are actually modern. We [visited] some mosques that are newly built during the last four or five years,” he said.
The comments of Mehdawi and the other panelists largely mirrored misleading Chinese government talking points.
After more evidence surfaced last year that the China government had razed thousands of mosques in the region, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman had released a statement Mehdawi’s comments, claiming there are more than 24,000 mosques in Xinjiang, or “a mosque for every 530 Muslims in Xinjiang, which is more mosques per capita than many Muslim countries.”
Various investigations and news reports run counter to that claim and suggest an accelerated campaign of mosque destruction started in 2016.
In August of that year, Chen Quanguo was promoted to the post of Xinjiang's party secretary, the region's top official. Earlier, while serving as Tibet's party secretary, Chen is widely believed a comprehensive system of social control in that region, where a massive crackdown on religious freedom and allegations of cultural genocide (from the United States and others) persist.
The estimate that there are 24,000 mosques in Xinjiang the Chinese government’s 2004 Economic Census.
There is significant evidence that figure is no longer current.
In December 2016, Radio Free Asia (RFA) that the Chinese Central Ethnic-Religious Affairs Department had launched a “Mosque Rectification,” putatively to promote public safety. Some 5,000 mosques were reportedly destroyed during the three-month campaign.
Wang Jingfu, head of Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee in Kashgar, confirmed the majority of the southern Xinjiang city’s mosques had been destroyed.
“We demolished nearly 70 percent of mosques in the city, because there were more than enough mosques and some were unnecessary,” Wang told RFA, reiterating that public safety was a primary concern.
Residents of other areas reported similar levels of destruction, and local officials confirmed those reports.
A July 2019 joint investigation by the Guardian newspaper and the investigative news site Bellingcat that dozens of religious sites had been razed in Xinjiang since 2016. Their researchers analyzed 91 religious sites using satellite imagery, and found that 31 mosques and two major shrines had suffered “significant structural damage” between 2016 and 2018.
Another 15 were found to have been destroyed or nearly destroyed. Former Xinjiang residents pointed out nine other sites that did not bear the typical outward features associated with mosques but were also locations where mosques apparently had been razed.
The previous month, Agence France-Presse that 36 mosques and religious sites in Xinjiang had “been torn down or had their domes and corner spires removed since 2017.”
The Uyghur Human Rights Project, a research-based advocacy organization located in Washington, D.C, in October 2019 that more than 100 mosques in the region had either been “fully destroyed or had an architectural element removed.”