Cui Haoxin (who writes under the pen name An Ran) was arrested twice in 2018 and 2020. He is free on bail but has now been savagely beaten by an “unknown” attacker.
by Ma Wenyan


Once upon a time, the CCP used to tell Chinese the story of the “good” Hui Muslims, ethnically Han and loyal to the Party, as opposite to the “bad” Uyghur and other non-Han Islamic troublemakers living within Chinese borders. It is surely true that more Hui Muslims than Uyghurs support the CCP, but this support is being eroded by the continuous harassment of the Hui, their mosques, and institutions under the pretext of “Sinicization.”
There are also Hui intellectuals who believe they cannot keep silent when their Uyghur co-religionists become the victims of a a genocide. One such brave Hui Muslim, and a famous one, is Cui Haoxin, a poet writing under the pen name of “An Ran.”
In 2018, Cui started writing about atrocities in Xinjiang, supporting the Uyghurs and pointing out that Hui Muslims also live there and have been detained in the dreaded “transformation through education” camps. He was arrested and sent to a reeducation camp himself.
He was released but arrested again in 2020 for having an account on Twitter, which is banned in China, and posting against the horrors vested on the Uyghurs. He was released on bail pending the scheduling of a trial whose date he was never informed of. The police used the threat of a trial to keep him silent, and the strategy worked.
However, after three years of silence, Cui has now reappeared to inform his friends and supporters that on October 29, when he went to the door of his building in Jinan, Shandong province, to collect a package from Yunda Express, he was badly beaten by an unknown man, who hit his eyes and damaged his optic nerve. Doctors told him there is a risk he may go blind.


Although he did not say it in so many words, Cui implied that the “unknown” man was actually sent to beat him by the CCP, to threaten and dissuade him from writing and posting on social media about Xinjiang or the Uyghurs.