China’s Fear of Words for the Dead

By Rukiye Turdush

A recently circulated video shows a woman, apparently from her outfit and party member badge on her chest, she is a Chinese government worker (probably Chinese communist party neighbourhood worker she chu) and communist party member. She is issuing a stark warning.

Her warning is directed at people who post images of their relatives’ graveyards and write farewell messages such as “rest in a beautiful place.” According to her statement, such expressions have already brought trouble to some people, and those who persist will end up somewhere they will “fit,” implying detention.

Full translation of her warning statement as follow:

“I am warning those who post images of their relatives’ graveyards and write words like ‘rest in a beautiful place.’ Why do you post the graves of your relatives on Douyin? Do you think the dead will return to life because of your posts? Wherever human beings rest, they will rest there whether you say ‘rest in a beautiful place’ or not. Because of people like you, others get into trouble. It is time to round up people like you. I warn you again, if you post such things and do not fit into this world, we will put you somewhere you will fit. Spread this warning widely.”

At first glance, this may appear to be another instance of strict online censorship. But a closer examination suggests something deeper: the regulation not only of speech, but also grief itself.

For Uyghur Muslims, offering prayers or blessings for the deceased is a basic religious and cultural practice. Phrases equivalent to “rest in peace” or supplications asking God to grant heaven are ordinary expressions of mourning found across Muslim societies. When overt religious language such as “May Allah grant you heaven.” “Rest in peace” becomes restricted, Uyghurs turn to indirect wording phrases that deliberately stripped of explicit religious meaning to express sorrow while avoiding punishment.

Millions of Uyghurs have been taken from their homes and detained in so called China’s “re-education” camps where Uyghurs subjected to torture, relentless ideological indoctrination, and demands that detainees abandon their faith. ¹ Beyond the camps, the Chinese government exercises tight control over the everyday religious lives of Uyghurs. Even the most ordinary expressions of belief are restricted: they are not only prevented from practicing Islam, but also be punished for greeting one another with “Essalamu eleykum,” the simple Arabic phrase meaning “peace be upon you.”²

¹ Lindsay Maizland, “China’sRepression of Uighurs in Xinjiang”, Council on Foreign Relations,30 June 2020.

² Zumret Dawut, “Pakistani Tourist’s Conversation with Uyghurs in East Turkistan” Face Book Video, 22, Nov, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1MsZtvj1RD/?mibextid=wwXIfr

What is striking in this case presented in the video is that even non-religious expressions of mourning appear to be treated as a crime, and even love for the deceased becomes something to hide. The boundary of prohibition has moved beyond theology or ritual into the emotional vocabulary of everyday life. When the state begins to police how citizens speak about the decesed, the issue is no longer only religious freedom or speech freedom. It becomes a question about supress, forbid and ultimately eroding human feeling. However, oppression in this question is not targeted Chinese citizens, it is specifically targeted Uyghurs as a race and ethnicity in China’s colonized East Turkistan.

Han Chinese citizens of China is free to visit their relatives grave yards, clean up graves, present food, drink, bow and burn paper money or paper and speak and ask guidance from dead ancestors.³ While this poses no problem for the Chinese government, religious practices and expressions of grief by Uyghurs are restricted. So, the issue, therefore, is not simply government regulation of its citizens, it is part of a broader pattern of colonization and cultural genocide against colonized people.

This dynamic recalls a central insight from George Orwell’s 1984. In the novel, the ruling power does not rely solely on surveillance or punishment. It constructs Newspeak, a controlled language designed to narrow the range of possible thought. Words such as “bad” are replaced by simplified forms like “ungood,” and “excellent” “doubleplusgood” while morally charged or political thinking terms disappear altogether.⁴ Even the word “free” is permitted only in trivial, non-political contexts. Orwell’s logic is explicit: if people lack the words to articulate dissent, their capacity to imagine dissent gradually erodes. According to Orwell, political manipulation of language can therefore distort how people understand reality.

The relevance of this literary framework lies not in simple comparison, but in analytical pattern. Systems of intensive political control often extend beyond actions into symbols, memory, and language. Regulating burial practices, restricting religious vocabulary, and discouraging public mourning all function to weaken and destroy continuity of Uyghur as an community. Graves connect the living to ancestry, belief in next world, and history. Limiting how those graves are remembered can therefore serve broader goals of cultural genocide.

The Chinese government’s sense of insecurity about its own power has driven intentions, plans, and policies that could destroy Uyghur culture and religion and, more broadly, eliminate religious funeral and marriage ceremonies and demolish mosques. ⁵ In turn, putting these intentions, plans, and policies into practice as cultural genocide demonstrates genocidal intent against the Uyghurs. Because culture reinforce identity, the destruction of that identity would threaten the very existence of the Uyghur people.

³ Hsu, Becky Yang, and Roman Palitsky, “Maintaining, Relinquishing, and Adapting Bonds in Bereavement: A Qualitative Study of Grave Sweeping in China,” SSM – Mental Health, vol. 3, 2023, article 100219, Elsevier, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2023.100219

⁴ George Orwell, 1984 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 49.

⁵ Asim Kashgarian, “Uighur Couple, Official’s Article Confirm China’s Ban on Islamic Marriage Vow,” VOA News, (Khmer), 2 Oct. 2020, https://khmer.voanews.com/a/5606220.html

In fact, forbidding individual grievances and not allowing individual Uyghurs to express their feelings with “rest in a beautiful place” is not only part of cultural genocide; it is a soul destruction that is far beyond the genocide stated in the definition of the Genocide Convention’s first act, which is “killing members of the group.”⁶ It is the killing of memory, it is forbidding love for passed loved ones, and it is destroying what it means to exist as a Uyghur and to pass this existence on generationally.

Through these measures, the Chinese government seeks to reshape Uyghurs into obedient human bodies that have no emotion, no historical continuity, and no voice within East Turkistan. However, such control cannot extend beyond China’s territorial and institutional boundaries, nor can it silence Uyghurs and others worldwide who advocate for justice and truth. Moreover, this dynamic reveals a deeper insecurity of Chinese authority that fears even the words spoken to the dead. Ultimately, this effort will fail, because history has already shown that no matter how deeply truth is buried, it will always finds ways to be heard.

⁶ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, December 9, 1948,78 U.N.T.S. 277; S. Exec. Doc. O, 81-1 (1949).