China has “systematically” changed the names of hundreds of villages with religious, historical, or cultural meaning for Uighurs to names that resonate with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch.
The rights group, working in partnership with Norwegian advocacy organisation Uyghur Hjelp, said it identified 630 villages in the far western region of Xinjiang whose names had been changed in this way by scraping data from 2009 to 2023 on the website of the National Bureau of Statistics of China. The most common replacements were Happiness, Unity, and Harmony.
