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As the Chinese Communist Party is a totalitarian entity, it views any other authority or object of loyalty as a competitor that must be destroyed. That’s why the Chinese government has cracked down so brutally upon the Uighur Muslims, and now a leading ChiCom official has announced the end goal of that persecution: the “Sinicization” of Islam. The U.S., and the West in general, can learn a great deal from what the Chinese are doing: it’s a grand lesson in what not to do.
Reuters reported Thursday that Ma Xingrui, the Communist Party top dog in Xinjiang, declared confidently that the inexorable march of history toward the dictatorship of the proletariat and pure Communism would take care of China’s little problem with Islamic jihadis. “Everyone knows,” he asserted, “that Islam in Xinjiang needs to be Sinicized, this is an inevitable trend.”
The Sinicization is already well underway. Reuters reminds us that “rights groups accuse Beijing of widespread abuses of Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority that numbers around 10 million in Xinjiang, including denying Uyghurs full religious freedoms. Beijing vigorously denies any abuses.” Also, ChiCom President Xi Jinping has on many occasions called for the “Sinicization” not only of Islam, but of Christianity and Buddhism as well, so that all religious expression becomes just another way of demonstrating one’s loyalty to the Communist state.
Sinicization, in the case of Christianity, has involved rewriting parts of the Bible to remove or alter passages that might inspire readers to think critically about Communism, forcing Christians to celebrate as heroes Communists who betrayed the Church, and requiring Christian teachers to attend Communist indoctrination sessions.
