News & Comment
Chinese Atheists will not Save us from the Western Imperialists

News

According to the New York Times:

The Trump administration is considering sanctions against Chinese senior officials and companies to punish Beijing’s detention of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs and other minority Muslims in large internment camps, according to current and former American officials.

The economic penalties would be one of the first times the Trump administration has taken action against China because of human rights violations. United States officials are also seeking to limit American sales of surveillance technology that Chinese security agencies and companies are using to monitor Uighurs throughout northwest China.

Discussions to rebuke China for its treatment of its minority Muslims have been underway for months among officials at the White House and the Treasury and State Departments. But they gained urgency two weeks ago, after members of Congress asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to impose sanctions on seven Chinese officials.

Comment

Muslims have become used to seeing the West as the enemy of Islam, responsible for the colonialism and exploitation of Muslims previously to which has now been added in the present age the untold destruction and massacre of Muslims through general war in numerous Muslim countries. All this led some Muslims to think that China could be a better partner or friend for Muslims, just as an earlier generation sought such relationships with the Soviet Union. However, these recent revelations of the unprecedented detention of perhaps up to a million Muslims in Chinese ‘re-education camps’ exposes the true reality of Communist China. The above article goes on to explain some of the details of this elaborate jail system designed for Chinese Uighur Muslims:

Human rights advocates and legal scholars say the mass detentions in the northwest region of Xinjiang are the worst collective human rights abuse in China in decades...

Chinese Muslims in the camps are forced to attend daily classes, denounce aspects of Islam, study mainstream Chinese culture and pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. Some detainees who have been released have described torture by security officers.

Chinese officials have labeled the process “transformation through education” or “counter-extremism education.” But they have not acknowledged that large groups of Muslims are being detained.

However, those who wished to see would be aware that even before this, China has been no friend to Muslims, particularly in Xinjiang. Long a frontier region between Muslims and China, the noble Uighur Muslim people were only forcibly absorbed into China during the decline of Islamic power in the late 19th Century when Uighur lands were formed into a new Chinese province, which is the literal meaning of the name Xinjiang. The difficulties of the Uighur people were compounded by the Chinese Communist revolution led by Mao Zedong in 1948 as the atheistic Communist ideology denies religion. As such, even the very large indigenous Chinese Muslims population came under great pressure from the Communist authorities.

Although there was an easing of restrictions on religion in the era of Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s passing, the authority of the Communist Party is being again reinforced under China’s current president Xi Jinping, and this is affecting indigenous Muslims also; a recent example is the attempt of authorities to demolish a mosque in Ningxia that was privately constructed by Hui Muslims, who are indigenously Chinese and not of Uighur origin.

China is no friend to foreign Muslim countries either. Communist foreign policy, whether of the Soviets or the Chinese, was once seen as being non-imperialistic, in contrast to the Capitalist Western powers. But recent Chinese moves, particularly under Xi Jingping’s modern-day silk route scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is showcasing all of the familiar attributes of Capitalist economic imperialism. Massive Chinese debt financing, totalling in the hundreds of billions of dollars, at significant interest rates, is being supplied to numerous Muslim countries only to have this finance returned to Chinese construction and energy companies that have been suffering overcapacity due to the slowdown of the domestic Chinese economy, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that such projects are designed in reality for China’s benefit rather than for target countries that will be indebted for generations.

Allah (swt) says in the Qur’an:

(لاَّ يَتَّخِذِ الْمُؤْمِنُونَ الْكَافِرِينَ أَوْلِيَاء مِن دُوْنِ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَمَن يَفْعَلْ ذَلِكَ فَلَيْسَ مِنَ اللّهِ فِي شَيْءٍ إِلاَّ أَن تَتَّقُواْ مِنْهُمْ تُقَاةً وَيُحَذِّرُكُمُ اللّهُ نَفْسَهُ وَإِلَى اللّهِ الْمَصِيرُ)

“Let not believers take disbelievers as allies rather than believers. And whoever [of you] does that has nothing with Allah, except when taking precaution against them in prudence. And Allah warns you of Himself, and to Allah is the [final] destination.” [Aal-i-Imran: 28]

This noble ayah does not only apply to us individually but also, and more importantly, applies to the Ummah as a whole in relation to disbelieving powers. The Muslim Ummah will not be able to extract itself from Western hegemony, exploitation, occupation and destruction by turning to mushrik atheist China but only by turning to Allah (swt), implementing his Deen through the re-establishment of the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet (saw), depending on our own strength and resources that exceed those of every nation on earth even today, and liberating all occupied Muslim territories including the Islamic land of what is now called Xinjiang thus forcing China to halt the mistreatment even of its indigenous Hui Muslim population.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Faiq Najah