Forced toponym changes in Xinjiang
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"China changed village names 'to erase Uyghur culture'", Anna Lamche, BBC (6/20/24)
I thought about this phenomenon again today, a year after that BBC article was published, because this morning Robert Thurman, the Columbia Tibetologist, told me about his concept of "ethnicide". This, forced name changes, is one way to do it.
China has changed the names of hundreds of villages in Xinjiang region in a move aimed at erasing Uyghur Muslim culture, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says.
According to a report by the group, hundreds of villages in Xinjiang with names related to the religion, history or culture of Uyghurs were replaced between 2009 and 2023.
Words such as "sultan" and "shrine" are disappearing from place names – to be replaced with terms such as "harmony" and "happiness", according to the research, which is based on China's own published data.
Although the communists had been forcibly changing East Turkestan village names from the time when they occupied the region and officially renamed it as "Xinjiang" ("New Borders / Territories"), the bulk of these noxious village name changes have come during the period between 2017 and 2019, when they also began the mass internment of Uyghur citizens in camps, which they referred to as a "War on Terrorism". More than a million Uyghurs were detained in such camps, cut off from their families for long periods of time.
Maya Wang, the acting China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The Chinese authorities have been changing hundreds of village names in Xinjiang from those rich in meaning for Uyghurs to those that reflect government propaganda,
“These name changes appear part of Chinese government efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uyghurs," she added.
Examples of such malevolent village name changes, which number in the thousands, are the following:
In 2018, Aq Meschit (White Mosque) village, in Akto County, was renamed Unity village, the report said. In 2022 the Karakax County village of Dutar – named for a Uyghur traditional instrument – was renamed Red Flag village.
(source)
Selected readings
- "A confusion of languages and names" (7/8/16)
- "A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns" (7/13/09)
- "China: Xinjiang government to 'clear up' ethnic names" by Kerry Allen (7/8/16)
Jerry Packard said,
August 4, 2025 @ 6:34 am
This strikes me as somewhat akin to officially changing the Gulf of Mexico’s name to downplay Mexican and Hispanic culture and influence in general, albeit on less grand a scale.
David Marjanović said,
August 4, 2025 @ 8:34 am
The river crab strikes again.
Ethnocide is a concept old enough and well enough established it has a Wikipedia article; Prof. Thurman didn't come up with it.
wgj said,
August 4, 2025 @ 1:47 pm
The surprising thing to me is not that this happened, but that it happened so late. Renaming places "Unity This" and "Red Flag That" was done in the 1950s all over China, and once again with renewed intensity during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. So why did they leave the Uyghur village names unchanged all this time if they routinely changed Han village names? And it's just the villages – for the main roads in the cities of Xinjiang are all like "Liberation Road", "Beijing Road", "Nation-Building Road" etc. (It's not because the Han cardres didn't understand Uyghur – in the early days of the People's Republic, there was a generation of native Uyghur communists, trained by the Soviet Union and Comintern, some with more prestigious revolutionary pedigree than the Yan'an clique.)
stephen said,
August 4, 2025 @ 9:33 pm
Is it possible the PRC will start demanding other countries start changing certain of their place names? Or, what if some visitor, or diplomatic representative enters the country and that person has a name whose ethnic origin the PRC objects to? Or a TV show or movie stars an actor or character with an ethnic name…etc.?
wgj said,
August 4, 2025 @ 10:44 pm
@stephen: It depends on your definition of "demand". China is already replacing the term "Tibet" with "Xizang" in official English language communications, and asking others to do the same. The fact that they haven't changed "Lhasa", "Urumqi", or "Hohhot" indicates that this isn't about linguistic uniformity, but related to the unique political potency of the name "Tibet". The timing suggests an expectation of (and preparation for) full-on propaganda war upon the passing of the current Dalai Lama.
Philip Taylor said,
August 5, 2025 @ 3:51 am
"upon the passing of the current Dalai Lama" — I attended the funeral of a dear friend, June Izbicki (relict of the late John Izbicki, born Horst Izbicki) at Staplehurst Free Church last week, and I was absolutely delighted to hear the celebrant saying that June had died rather than "passed", "passed on", or any of the reality-avoiding terms that almost everyone seems to prefer these days …
Thomas said,
August 5, 2025 @ 6:49 am
@Philip Taylor, speaking of euphemisms, I always found the Italian expression of "scomparso" (vanished) especially strange. This is the word newspapers use when people die. And as a language learner, it takes a moment to realize that in this context, the word is referring to a deceased person and not someone who has gone missing.
Evan said,
August 5, 2025 @ 11:01 am
Despite decades of fabricated history promoted by state-sponsored scholars to assert that the Uyghur region has always been part of China, the Communist regime has fundamentally treated it as a colony. Within this colonial framework, full control necessitates not only the forced assimilation of the local population but also the systematic erasure of their cultural memory. The renaming of places has long been a central tool in this strategy.
This practice can be traced back to the Cultural Revolution, when tens of thousands of villages were renamed with strongly ideological titles such as “Solidarity,” “Progress,” and “Red Flag.” These names remain common throughout the rural areas of Uyghur region today—almost every township has villages bearing one or more of these names.
Even after the Cultural Revolution, the regime seldom directly replaced Turkic place names with Chinese equivalents. Instead, as waves of Han settlers moved into the region, traditional place names were gradually displaced by those introduced by newcomers.
For Uyghurs, losing place names may not have seemed the most urgent concern, especially when their physical safety was threatened due to their ethnic or religious identity. As a result, many Uyghurs not only abandoned religious practices and endured the demolition of their mosques, but also complied with policies that forced them to relinquish cherished religious names, such as “Muhammad.” In extreme cases, individuals even went so far as to register as Han to escape systemic discrimination and repression officially.
One can only imagine how much more is happening in Uyghur Region (Xinjiang) beyond what the media has been able to uncover.