China deployed hundreds of police and made arrests in a mostly Muslim southwestern town after clashes erupted over the planned partial demolition of a mosque, witnesses said.
The town of Nagu, Yunnan Province, recently pushed ahead with plans to raze four minarets and the dome roof of the Najiaying Mosque, a resident said on Monday, requesting anonymity.
The area is home to an enclave of Hui, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group.
Photo: AFP
On Saturday, officers wielding truncheons and riot shields repelled a crowd outside the mosque, with some hurling objects at police, videos circulating on social media and the witness said.
“They want to proceed with forced demolitions, so the people here went to stop them,” a local woman who also asked not to be identified told reporters.
“The mosque is home for Muslims like us,” she said. “If they try to knock it down, we certainly won’t let them.”
“Buildings are just buildings — they do no harm to people or society,” she said. “Why do they have to destroy them?”
Police have made an unspecified number of arrests over the incident and several hundred officers remained in the town as of Monday, the two witnesses said.
People in areas around the mosque had struggled intermittently with Internet outages and other connectivity issues since the clashes, they said.
A notice issued on Sunday by the Tonghai government — which administers Nagu — said that it had opened an investigation into “a case that severely disrupted social management and order.”
The notice ordered those involved to “immediately stop all illegal and criminal acts,” vowing to “severely punish” anyone who refuses to turn themselves in.
Those who surrender before Tuesday next week would be treated with leniency, the notice said.
An official in Tonghai’s publicity department yesterday denied that there were any Internet outages, but declined to comment further.
Beijing has sought to more tightly control religion since Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) came to power a decade ago.
Beijing says that a crackdown on Muslims is to combat terrorism and extremist thought.
An estimated 1 million Uighurs, Hui and other Muslim minorities have been detained in the western region of Xinjiang since 2017 under a government campaign that the US and rights groups have called a genocide.
While the effects on communities outside Xinjiang has been milder, many have seen their mosques demolished or “coercively renovated” to match official notions of Chinese aesthetics, said David Stroup, an expert on the Hui at the University of Manchester in the UK.
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