"Here in Kashgar, the fabled Silk Road outpost near China’s border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, officials have banned mosques from broadcasting the call to prayer, forcing muezzins to shout out the invocation five times a day from rooftops across the city. The new rule is an addition to longstanding policies that prohibit after-school religious classes and children under 18 from entering mosques. (The installation of video cameras on mosque doorways in recent months makes such rules hard to ignore.)
Southeast of Kashgar, shopkeepers in the city of Hotan seethed over a government decision to outlaw two dozen names considered too Muslim, forcing parents to rename their children or be unable to register them for school, according to local residents and the police...
Since 2014, Uighurs seeking to travel outside their hometowns have been required to carry a special card that lists phone numbers for the holder’s landlord and local police station. Many Uighurs complain that these “convenience contact cards,” as they are called, single them out for scrutiny...
It remains a matter of dispute whether radical Islam has taken hold among many Uighurs, the majority of whom subscribe to a moderate form of Sunni Islam. But the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and the Islamic State’s killing in November of a Chinese hostage in Syria have prompted Beijing to step up efforts to position its battle to pacify Xinjiang as part of the global war on violent religious extremism.
Experts outside China, however, say much of the bloodshed here is fueled by local grievances, among them job discrimination against Uighurs, endemic poverty and a widespread belief that the flood of Han migrants to the region is part of a government plan to dilute Uighur identity."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/world/asia/xinjiang-seethes-under-chinese-crackdown.html?_r=0
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