Xinjiang: China accused of renaming hundreds of Uyghur villages

Researchers from HRW and Norway-based organisation Uyghur Hjelp studied the names of villages in Xinjiang from the website of the National Bureau of Statistics of China over the 14-year period.

They found the names of 3,600 of the 25,000 villages in Xinjiang were changed during this time.

While the majority of these name changes “appear mundane”, HRW said, around one fifth – or 630 changes – remove references to Uyghur religion, culture or history.

Words freighted with meaning for China’s Uyghur population – including Hoja, a title for a Sufi religious teacher, and political or honorific titles such as Sultan and beg – have been replaced with words HRW claims reflect “recent Chinese Communist Party ideology”, including “harmony” and “happiness”.

In one example highlighted by the report, Aq Meschit (“white mosque”) in Akto County, a village in the southwest of Xinjiang, was renamed Unity village in 2018.

A growing body of evidence points to systematic human rights abuses against the country’s Uyghur Muslim population. Beijing denies the accusations.

Most of China’s Uygur Muslims live in the north-west of the country, in areas such as Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu and Ningxia.