- As China’s leadership faces pressure over the treatment of minorities in Xinjiang, Muslims in other parts of Asia can do little but express dissent
- Muslim identity politics in Asia differs from that in the Middle East making cross-national Muslim blocs an unlikely threat to China
Calls for the “Muslim world” to put greater pressure on China for its treatment of its minority Muslim population in Xinjiang are destined to fail. The economic reasons for the reluctance of many Muslim-majority states are obvious but they are not even the prime reasons for the perceived indifference.
China’s Muslims represent a vastly different religious culture from Muslims in other parts of Asia – let alone to those in the Middle East – making it difficult for Uyghurs and other minority ethnic groups to create the kind of communal understanding required for Muslims elsewhere to regard Xinjiang as a religious conflict instead of a domestic issue.
Ethnic conflict involving Muslims in other parts of Asia further complicate matters. In Myanmar, India, the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and elsewhere, Muslim minorities are in conflict either with their governments or with majority ethnic groups; which constrains Asia’s Muslims from building a broad consensus against any one particular party.
Neither does a state capable of providing leadership in the region exist in Asia, nor have any expressed the ambition to do so. Saudi Arabia is a considerable power in the Middle East precisely because of its immense wealth and its willingness to exploit it to indenture its neighbours. But the largest and most resourced Muslim nation in Asia, Indonesia, does not share similar inclinations towards its fellow Muslim-majority states – Bangladesh, Brunei, Malaysia, and Pakistan.
Neither has Saudi Arabia, which no doubt exercises clout within the Sunni Muslim world, shown that it is prepared to take on China about its Uyghur issue. The Saudis are well aware that what happens in Xinjiang ultimately does not rise to an existential problem worth sacrificing the close relationship that the Kingdom shares with China.
China’s ties with other Muslim-majority states in Central Asia through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation have also made it far too costly for these states (namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and the other observer states and dialogue partners) to express disagreement with China’s domestic activities (nor for that matter are those states in any high moral position to do so).
These cultural and geopolitical dynamics of Muslim identity politics in Asia have been the primary reasons why we expectations of a cross-national Muslim bloc to emerge are misguided – in spite of what unsettling information, videos, photographs, interviews, or satellite imagery are published about the state of Xinjiang’s Muslim population.
The history of Chinese state action against its Uyghur community is well known, but it has only been in recent years that the international scrutiny over its practices has compelled Chinese officials to manage public sentiment more assertively.
Chinese officials have not denied that large numbers of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang – estimates place it at upwards of 1 million – have been placed in mass detention facilities. But they have accepted that whatever reputational losses they suffer from the repression of an ethnic minority are suffered in places – such as the U.S. and Western Europe – which already do not hold China in high esteem to start with.
They have decided that whatever harm is done to their ambitions to be seen as a moderate, credible, and responsible actor on the world stage have been sustained in countries that are unlikely to accept China as a co-equal power anyway; so what harm is done is easily reckoned and predictable.
It is the lack of new challenges to the situation in Xinjiang that suggests that while much international publicity has been generated since 2017, there is no good reason to believe that the mass detention of Uyghurs will stop anytime soon.
So far China has been able to respond to existing criticism by making various perfunctory claims that no one has been detained, or that those held in mass internment facilities have been kept either for a short time or for educational or vocational reasons, or that they have voluntarily admitted, or have already “graduated.”
It is true that these changing narratives are a response to heightened public interest, but much of that interest has escalated in tandem with ongoing U.S.-China strategic competition rather than as a consequence to opposition from Muslim-majority states which have not and cannot consolidate their positions in any meaningful way.
Any objections against China’s actions now might also place Asia’s Muslims in an awkward position of taking common sides with the U.S., which has historically been regarded by Muslims with greater suspicion and mistrust than the Chinese are viewed in Asia.
These are not immutable perceptions and over a long time it is possible that Muslim-majority states in Asia may decide to take a collective and forceful stand against China. But for now Asia’s Muslims can do little more than express gentle dissent in muted and symbolic support for their compatriots in China’s largest province.
By Daud Hassan M.
Editor’s note: The author uses the term “Muslim” to refer to all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, China who subscribe to the Islamic faith. AAA knows that in addition to Uyghurs, there are other Muslim minority ethnic groups such as the Kazakhs and the Hui who live in Xinjiang.