By Cui Haoxin
I wondered at the high survivability of this video when it reappeared on Twitter. Three years ago, it ever provoked a wave of anti-muslim on Chinese social networks.
The video named ‘Lovely girl from Gansu reciting the Koran’ dates from 2014. It had been unknown to the public for two years. This video went viral online in 2016 because of special political cause. 2016 is the key year to both Hui Muslim and Chinese modern history. At that year, the national religions work conference was held by Chinese communists in April. A month later, Chinese anti-muslim activists suddenly launched a massive attack against Hui Muslim with this video and alleged that Northwest China faced serious Islamization. Hui Muslim is previously a secret like this video. Chinese Communists forbade the people to discuss the sensitive ‘ethnic issues’ for the long term. Hui Muslim also kept a low profile. Though Hui has the most Muslim population in China, Hui Muslim is still familiar stranger to Chinese. The common Chinese even is too difficult to distinguish Hui Muslim from Uyghur. When Chinese Communists leader suddenly opened up the Pandora box, all kinds of misunderstandings and bias against minorities flooded online. The results was so when Chinese anti-muslim activists who almost arose overnight began to attack this video on Weibo, a kind of Chinese microblog like Twitter. And they reported it to the authorities.
Facing this noisy political attack, a few insightful persons reminded the cultural revolution forty years ago. The story also expanded according to old history script: children are forbidden into mosque, ‘illegal’ religious books are banned, Arabic signs are wiped off and mosques are destroyed. But Hui Muslims were poorly prepared for it including me then. Horrified, Chinese Muslims began to defend their religious freedom rights and called on ‘ethnic solidarity'. But it’s useless and we didn’t know the scenes in politics and old political correctness was abandoned.
Someone's Weibo accounts were deleted and someone disappeared in the normal life.
Hui Muslims slowly became voiceless online. Our history and reality images are totally demonized. As karl Marx said: ‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.’ It’s still our fate.
In 2016, a large-scale crackdown against Hui Muslim unfolded. That small video is a trigger.
The story behind seems to not be worthy of telling. No surprise. Gansu province’s department of education quickly responded to the complaint of anti-muslim activist and condemned religion activities is ‘harmful to youth’s physical and mental health'.
When an AFP journalist discovered this video from an Indonesian anti-American militant and informed me on Twitter, I just knew some pro-china Indonesians are attacking Uyghurs with this old video about Hui Muslim. Too ridiculous! The old trick is back. Islamophobia made in China is exported to the global.
I’m impressed by this video because it provoked a wave of anti-muslim(#反清真运动) on Chinese social networks in 2016. It was filmed in Gansu. And it’s about Hui Muslim but unrelated to Uyghur topics that the Indonesian anti-American militant is talking about.— 真回安然 ☪️ Cui Haoxin (@ismaelan) December 26, 2019
(1) https://t.co/cZl4mJBYWp
