Religious and cultural mentions removed from names of China’s Xinjiang villages

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Authorities in China’s western Xinjiang region have been systematically replacing the names of villages inhabited by Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities to reflect the ruling Communist Party’s ideology, as part of an attack on their cultural identity, a report released by Human Rights Watch said Wednesday. About 630 villages in Xinjiang have had their names changed to remove references to Islam or the Uyghurs’ culture and history, according to the group’s report, done in collaboration with the Norway-based organization Uyghur Hjelp. The report compared the names of...