China’s Campaign Against Ramadan

Here is a shocking story of state-sponsored anti-Muslim persecution in China.

China has a long history of Muslim persecution that goes back decades. Will this story be reported by the “revolutionary socialist” blogs which claim to catalogue incidents of Islamophobia? This means either Islamophobia-Watch (“Documenting anti-Muslim bigotry”) or SocialistUnity? Unlikely, neither Islamists nor the far-left, in their efforts to attribute blame to incidents of draconian anti-Muslim bigotry include abuses by the PRC. Why the ideological selectiveness, you may ask? Simple, China isn’t Jewish Israeli enough for the Islamists to get their bilious juices flowing, and the British far-left just can’t bash the bugbears of “Western Imperialism” and “Zionism” when it comes to Chinese Islamophobia, they really are not that concerned about Chinese Muslims.

For years, China has restricted observance of Ramadan for Communist Party members and government cadres. On one website for an agricultural bureau, for instance, employees were reminded “not to practice any religion, not to attend religious events and not to fast.”

This year, the local Communist Party also ordered restaurants to remain open during the day, even though chefs and most of their potential customers were fasting. Failure to keep their doors open made restaurants subject to fines of up to $780, the equivalent of several months’ salary.

So restaurateurs made token gestures, assigning one waiter to sit in the doorway and a chef to make a single dish that would be either eaten cold at night or discarded.

In Kashgar, across from the Id Kah Mosque, the largest in China, travelers described a bored teenage waiter in a Muslim skullcap sitting in the doorway of a darkened restaurant looking out onto the dusty sidewalk as if waiting for the customers he knew wouldn’t come.

Along the entire strip, restaurants were similarly unlit and empty, with none of the usual smells of roasting lamb wafting from the kitchens.

“They just offer what they can to avoid trouble,” said a doctor in his late 20s, who asked not to be quoted by name for fear of retaliation. He described the compromise at one of his favorite restaurants, where the chef made only rice pilaf. “The chefs can’t even taste the food to make sure it is delicious.”

The policy extended deeper into Xinjiang province than just Kashgar. In Aksu, 250 miles to the northeast, the municipal website warned that restaurant owners “who close without reason during the ‘Ramadan period’ will be severely dealt with according to the relevant regulations.”

Residents of Xinjiang province say that Chinese policies regarding Ramadan have become steadily more draconian over the years.