Part II: Sinicization in Practice: Implementation and Effects
As detailed in Part I above, Sinicization is a sprawling project, with implications that touch all aspects of life in affected communities. In Part II of this report, we explore how Sinicization policy has been implemented and discuss its impact on China’s Muslim communities. To do so, we divide Sinicization policy into five main areas of implementation, namely 1) organization, 2) aesthetics, 3) scripture, language, and education, 4) surveillance and monitoring, and 5) mosque mergers. These categories are loose and do not represent policy domains as defined in state documents. Moreover, these domains should not be understood as isolated from each other – rather, actions clustered in each domain work to bolster other areas of impact. Additionally, certain measures (notably the expansion of rural surveillance and tightening of control over Party committees) act to reinforce the implementation of Sinicization policy, but are themselves part of wider authoritarian policy implementation in the contemporary PRC.
To analyze these processes, we have collated a database of items dealing with the implementation of Sinicization policy. The sources collected vary widely, from China Islamic Association briefings and reports, local government policy reports, and local United Front branch updates to social media posts written by individuals with interest in the implementation of Sinicization policy. While in most instances links to the original evidence are provided, in limited instances the authors have elected to provide a code in place of the original reference for social media posts made by private individuals to protect their identities. Further information is available on request from the researchers. Much information around the Sinicization of Islam is suppressed, and affected communities are discouraged from talking publicly about measures they have experienced. As a result, although we attempt to present as full and comprehensive a picture as possible to understand Sinicization in action, inevitably there is more information available on certain aspects and on certain locations. This report should be taken as a preliminary survey of these domains.
3.0 Organization
Control of religious organizations is understood as a precondition for the implementation of religious work policies. This has entailed a tightening of policies on four fronts, namely 1) an emphasis on the behavior and responsibilities of grassroots cadres, 2) tightening control over the China Islamic Association (CIA), 3) mosque committees, and 4) mosque personnel.
3.1 Policing Cadre Behavior
Across the PRC, disciplinary inspections of cadres form a key backdrop to the implementation of Sinicization policy. Performance of atheism has always been an expectation for high-ranking party officials. However, in practice, it was often tacitly accepted that village-level officials were also sometimes religiously active. Indeed, the party-state has a long, sometimes complicated history of working with and in religious communities, creating a “middle ground” in which space is made for Islamic community, in practice and law. While increased attention to grassroots cadre behavior and campaigns for ensuring moral probity among officials have been a feature of the Xi years more broadly, measures for the Sinicization of religion have been accompanied by tightening of religious discipline for cadres across the board. The religious attitudes of local officials were identified as a key barrier to the achievement of Party policy objectives, and hence, reform of grassroots cadre behavior has been prioritized as necessary for achieving the broader policy aims of the Sinicization campaign.
Such emphasis on religious discipline is most clearly seen in the 2018 revision to the Regulations on Discipline and Punishment for Chinese Communist Party, which added a clause (Article 62) specifically stating that Party members who hold religious faith themselves should be provided with “thought education.” If, following intervention, there is no change observed in their beliefs, they should be persuaded to give up their membership or stripped of it. Those who participate in activities which “use religion as incitement” are also to be expelled. The Regulations represent the most concrete instantiation of earlier commitments to atheism as a key aspect of cadre discipline found in resolutions such as the “Certain Principles for Political Life within the Party Under the New Situation” (关于新形势下党内政治生活的若干准则), passed at the sixth Plenary Session of the 18th National Congress.
A 2018 inspection tour of Ningxia conducted under the auspices of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection found that Ningxia party organizations had ‘serious shortcomings’ in the leadership of religious work. In response, the Ningxia Party Committee launched a series of activities, intended to reassert the “Marxist view of ethnicity and religion” to cadres at all levels within the provincial system. The measures also note refinements to working practices and functional positioning for cadres dealing with ethnic and religious work. These emphasize oversight of cadres involved in such work, noting that cadres found to have taken ‘inappropriate actions’ in handling religious affairs will be strictly dealt with.
The impact of the updated Regulations can be seen across China, and especially in areas with concentrations of Islamic population. In Linxia, 4,557 cadres and party members were required to sign formal commitments of atheism. Section-level cadres were required to attend training on the spirit of the 19th National Congress of the CPC in order that they could better guide those under their supervision to realize their previously pledged commitment to atheism. Inspections were launched of all cadres found to have worn religious garments, with further monitoring of behavior following thereafter. Retired cadres in the area were also required to attend training to reassert the primacy of the Party, in a move that echoes reports from Qinghai and Ningxia that retired cadres have been banned from performing the Hajj.
In 2019, Aksai Kazakh Prefecture in Gansu reported that – in response to the issue of “Party members and public officials participating in the Hajj,” which had been raised as an issue by an earlier disciplinary inspection – the prefectural government had banned all Party members from religious belief and initiated investigations into Party members found to have previously performed the Hajj. Several were subjected to intensive personalized interventions intended to transform their thinking following these investigations, although the outcome of such interventions remains unclear from the available reports. Zhangjiachuan, Gansu, conducted similar inspections and mass training on party-state religious policies and atheism for cadres across 2020, with a particular focus on village-level cadres and on ensuring that cadres were banned from performing the Hajj. Zhangjiachuan reported improvement of pre-appointment approval mechanisms to ensure that religious believers and clergy could not serve as village cadres. The area also reported reforms to reporting procedures to ensure that responsibility for religious work could not be evaded to guarantee the implementation of religious policy at the local level.
Reassertion of the importance of cadres holding the ‘correct’ attitude to religion has functioned both as a statement of the priority that religious work has under the current regime, a rationale for the removal of cadres at the grassroots, and a tool for checking enforcement. Disciplinary oversight has further aided the development of new working methods at the grassroots level. These changes are seen most noticeably in Ningxia, which – following a 2018 disciplinary inspection – instituted a series of training for cadres on Xi Jinping Thought and approaches to religious work, as well as a series of reforms to working practices to ensure that grassroots-level officials were held accountable for fulfilling their duties in religious work. These reforms created cross-department working groups, thereby strengthening Party groups at the lowest level. These groups have allowed extensive coordination between local cadres, United Front, PSB, and other relevant organizations, effectively combating the fragmented authoritarianism that often characterizes PRC governance at the lowest level. Disciplinary inspections continue to be utilized as a method for inspecting religious work across key areas, as in the September 2023 inspection of religious work in Pingliang in Gansu.
Scrutinizing cadres suspected to hold religious beliefs through training and investigations – and threatening disciplinary measures for those found to be ‘two-faced’ – ensured that when instructions like those given in “Document 10” were circulated, local governments rushed to show that they were implementing them accordingly. For example, in Linxia from 2017 onwards, a number of departments that seemingly had little to do with Islamic work held meetings to study the spirit of Xi Jinping’s instructions, including Linxia Archives and the Environmental Bureau. Following its study meeting, the Environmental Bureau determined that its own remit included tackling the use of loudspeakers in mosques to broadcast the call to prayer under regulations on noise pollution. In 2018, Linxia convened an all-prefecture conference to study the spirit of Xi Jinping’s instructions on Islamic work. Later that month, local county leaders down to the township level in Hezheng County, Linxia were required to sign commitments to Sinicization and resisting the Three Transformations. In effect, the scope of religious work was expanded to all areas of government, leaving officials to determine the scope of implementation within their own domains.
The impact of these measures to police cadres’ behavior has been far-reaching. In areas where village cadres are now also expected to lead mosque management committees as part of further organizational changes, the presence of an official who cannot participate in the life of the community is an interruption to the normal conduct of religious affairs. In a recent case in Yunnan, Party members were explicitly banned from fasting during Ramadan, in contrast to previous years when this had been tolerated. The threat of being labelled a “two-faced official” has made that designation into a self-fulfilling prophecy: cadres who never previously saw any inherent antagonism between being a part of the party and being a member of the religious community now find themselves having to navigate complicated tensions between their professional and social worlds. Pressure to enforce the party-state’s bans by reporting those who violate them places these ‘unofficially’ religious cadres under tremendous strain.
