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In May 2016, the Emirates airline inaugurated its new direct service to the Chinese city of Yinchuan. Yinchuan joins Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou as destinations served by Emirates, meaning that a passenger who boards a plane in Dubai is now able to fly nonstop to China’s first, second, third, or 71st most-populous urban area.

Yinchuan, situated on the loess-covered floodplain of the Yellow River in the autonomous region of Ningxia, nearly 600 miles west of Beijing and far from China’s booming coastal cities, is a peculiar destination for international tourists. But that remoteness has not deterred Chinese officials from pouring resources into a quixotic plan to turn the city into a “cultural tourism destination” for wealthy Arabs.
To look the part, Yinchuan is undergoing an ambitious makeover. All of its street signs have been repainted to add Arabic translations and transliterations to the existing Chinese and English. Across from People’s Square in the city center stands an imposing convention center that has hosted the China-Arab States Expo, a biennial event that brings together businessmen and women from China and the Middle East. South of downtown, a $3.5 billion project to build a “World Muslim City” is slated to be completed in 2020. At Yinchuan Hedong International Airport, construction continues on a nearly 900,000-square-foot terminal to accommodate the anticipated surge in air traffic, including future direct flights from Amman and Kuala Lumpur.
The centerpiece of Yinchuan’s transformation is a lavish theme park that celebrates the history and culture of China’s largest Muslim ethnicity, the Hui. According to Ningxia’s tourism bureau, the China Hui Culture Park is a “Sino-Arab cultural bridge” that can “promote all aspects of Sino-Arab exchange and cooperation.” The park achieves a monumental scale, with its sparkling edifices designed to evoke India’s Taj Mahal and Turkey’s Blue Mosque.
In the United States, a theme park that puts the culture of a marginalized and misunderstood religious group on public display, dramatizing that group’s history through dance routines performed by minority women in elaborate costumes and encouraging tourists to dress their children in traditional outfits purchased from the gift shop, might be regarded with some skepticism. In China, by contrast, the Hui Culture Park is heralded as an “AAAA national tourist site.”
China’s aggressive “Open Up the West” program of development has seen its fair share of questionable projects. In one notorious misstep, Chinese authorities spent more than $1 billion to construct Kangbashi, a town near Ordos, Inner Mongolia, they once hoped would house 1 million people; instead, the completed buildings sit empty. Though part of the same national campaign, Yinchuan’s development is unique because of the central role that religion has played in dictating its course. In Yinchuan, plans to attract Arab tourists epitomize a more profound attempt to articulate, prescribe, and export a vision of Chinese Islam that can be palatable to Beijing and serve its diplomatic purposes abroad.
Since 1958, Yinchuan has been the capital of the autonomous region ostensibly governed by members of China’s Hui Muslim minority, a status that has invested the city with cultural significance. The Hui, who traditionally speak Mandarin Chinese, are ethnically and linguistically related to the dominant Han majority. Numbering roughly 10.6 million (or 0.8 percent of the Chinese population), they comprise the largest of the 10 “nationalities” into which China’s Muslim population is divided. Those figures make the Hui only slightly more numerous than the Uighur (10.1 million), the Turkic-speaking plurality of China’s restive Xinjiang region farther to the west. It is the Uighur who dominate headlines about terrorist conspiracies, government repression, and intercommunal violence. The Hui, by contrast, are generally regarded as more thoroughly assimilated into Chinese society.
In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Chinese government had few worries about showing off Xinjiang to visiting dignitaries. In fact, when Egyptian Minister of Pious Endowments Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri became the first Arab official to make a formal visit to Communist China in spring 1955, the Chinese Foreign Ministry arranged for him to attend Eid al-Fitr celebrations marking the end of Ramadan in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi. In the 21st century, however, Ningxia has supplanted Xinjiang as Beijing’s approved destination for Muslim visitors, part of a conscious strategy to shift focus from the Uighur to the Hui.
At a moment in which China’s ties to the Islamic world are fraught with tension, it is easy to see why this shift has occurred. In the past few years, the Chinese government has come under fire for its alleged repression of its Muslims. The nominal leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared in July 2014 that China is a country where “Muslim rights are forcibly seized.” After the government of Turkey denounced China’s policies in Xinjiang in July 2015, protesters took to the streets of Istanbul, vandalizing local Chinese restaurants and attacking several Chinese tour groups. In December, a media center linked to the Islamic State ramped up its criticism of China and began appealing directly to the Hui as well as the Uighur when it released a nasheed — a type of Islamic chant — in fluent Mandarin calling on Muslims to “wake up” to overcome “a century of slavery.” Together, these developments have demonstrated the concern of some Middle Eastern Muslims for their coreligionists and underscored Beijing’s ongoing interest in promoting an alternative conception of Chinese Islam.
Read more: China’s Massive, Garish Theme Park for the Muslim World
Source: FP
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