Authorities hope the saccharine ‘Little Apple’ can calm tensions in the western region.<\/p>\n
By Rachel Lu
February 12, 2015<\/p>\n
Beijing\u2019s latest weapon against Islamic extremism? A viral Internet song. On Feb. 8, a reported 10,000 people danced in a plaza next to the Id Kah, China\u2019s largest mosque, in Kashgar, the westernmost city in the Xinjiang region in western China. Organized by city government, they stepped to the tune of \u201cLittle Apple<\/a>,\u201d a viral Internet ditty that The Los Angeles Times <\/em>has called<\/a> the \u201cChinese Macarena.\u201d The gathering appears to be part of Xinjiang\u2019s effort to \u201cde-radicalize<\/a>\u201d the Uighurs, a mostly-Muslim Turkic people that comprise<\/a> approximately 47 percent of the region\u2019s population of 22 million, and, to quote state media, \u201csave<\/a>\u201d them from extreme forms of Islamism that the government claims are driving adherents towards separatism and even terrorism.<\/p>\n The people who most need saving, presumably, are the Uighurs, at least those turning to radical strains of Islam that the government accuses<\/a> of destabilizing the region. On July 30, 2014, three young Uighurs stabbed<\/a> and killed the government-friendly imam of Id Kah mosque. In July 2014, almost 100 people, both Uighur and members of the majority Han, were killed<\/a> when a group of axe-wielding Uighurs attacked local government building and police station in Shache, a smaller town near Kashgar, according<\/a> to the government, followed by another attack in Shache that led<\/a> to at least 15 deaths in Nov. 2014. Beijing has linked each of these incidents to radical Islam. <\/strong><\/p>\n By contrast, the latest campaign in Xinjiang is determinedly cheery. Photos on Tianshan Net, a Xinjiang government news portal, showed<\/a> hundreds of people in matching outfits, both Uighur and Han, lined up in a coordinated square dance. The women wore blue or red dresses \u2014 with no veils in sight \u2014 and the men were clean-shaven. Large Chinese national flags flapped in the wind, as the crowd danced to \u201cLittle Apple.\u201d The song, with an up-tempo beat and sugary lyrics \u2014 \u201cYou are my little apple, little apple, I can never ever love you enough\u201d \u2014 swept China in 2014, inspiring recruiting videos<\/a> from China\u2019s military, the People\u2019s Liberation Army, and a cover version<\/a> from a Korean girl group.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all part of \u201cde-radicalization,\u201d which Xinjiang party secretary Zhang Chunxian described<\/a> in June 2014 as the government\u2019s \u201cmost urgent task.\u201d Since then, the government has organized mass lectures, one-on-one counseling<\/a>, art contests<\/a>, speech contests<\/a>, variety shows<\/a>, and soccer games<\/a> to advance the effort. Yet it\u2019s unclear precisely what de-radicalization means; state media frequently uses the term lodged in quotation marks, without precisely defining it. State media reports have clearly linked<\/a> it to public safety, stability, and religion, sending the signal that de-radicalization has something to do with increased government control in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n It\u2019s doubtful the local population has warmed to the recent charm campaign. At least some Muslims well versed in Han culture and active on Weibo, the popular microblogging platform, seem to find the government\u2019s attempt to secularize their brethren distasteful. \u201cI really don\u2019t want to eat apples any more,\u201d wrote<\/a> Kurbanjan Samat, a Uighur photographer working in Beijing for China Central Television, the state-owned television. (Samat has previously had spoken out<\/a> against radical Islamism in an interview with Phoenix Weekly<\/em>, a Hong Kong based magazine.) Someone identifying as a young Uighur rapper wrote<\/a> on Weibo, \u201cDon\u2019t organize such useless activities to lie to the higher-ups in the party, lie to the people, and lie to the rest of the country. Even if you move the dancing into the halls of Id Kah Mosque, the problems would remain, and no form of dancing can make it go away.\u201d One Internet user who identified as a Uighur woman commented<\/a>, \u201cAre they crazy? How does this solve any problems? The local leaders must be quite thick.\u201d<\/p>\n To be sure, \u201cde-radicalization\u201d programs are not unique to China. Many Western countries concerned with Muslim extremism, including Canada<\/a>, the United Kingdom<\/a>, Germany<\/a>, and Denmark<\/a>, have launched<\/a> programs aimed at stemming the influence of jihadist groups like the Islamic State. But China\u2019s approach \u2013 such as banning<\/a> veils and beards in some Xinjiang cities \u2013 can sometimes seem heavy-handed, even culturally insensitive. Although the local party announced<\/a> that it\u2019s planning more dance competitions, that softer approach is thus far doing little to calm persistent tensions between Uighurs and the Han.<\/p>\n Fair use\/Weixin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Authorities hope the saccharine ‘Little Apple’ can calm tensions in the western region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-1649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1649"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=1649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}