China’s Muslim majority town of Yunnan saw violent confrontation between protestors and police personnel after a mosque’s dome was demolished in a planned way.
Najiaying Mosque is a 13th-century Muslim religious structure outside which the protestors gathered in huge numbers on Saturday, as could be seen in videos uploaded on social media. Fight started between them and the police as the latter surrounded them.
The Chinese government claims to respect religious freedom despite the country’s avowed atheism. Nevertheless, experts claim that there has been a stepped-up crackdown on organised religion in recent years as Beijing attempts to exert more control.
The Najiaying Mosque in Nagu has been a prominent religious structure which had grown in recent years with a new domed roof and some minarets.
In 2020, a court decided against the new dome and minarets and asked the authorities to remove them, calling them illegal. The demonstrations appeared to have been spurred by recent efforts to carry out that directive.
Videos of the protests on Saturday showed police standing at the entrance of the mosque preventing any entry, while a group of men pushing the police in order to enter the mosque. The video footage also showed some of them throwing rocks at the officers.
In other video footages, the cops could be seen later moving away as the crowd enters the Najiaying Mosque.
In a statement released on Sunday, the authorities in Tonghai County—where Nagu is situated—called on protesters to turn themselves in by June 6. So far, several have been detained. The notice said, “Those who voluntarily turn themselves in and truthfully confess the facts of violations and crimes may be given a lighter or mitigated punishment.”
The authorities called the act as “a serious obstruction of social management order”, and appealed to those not participating to “actively report” protesters.
The Hui, one of 56 designated ethnic groups by Beijing, are mainly Sunni Muslims. Of the roughly 10 million Hui Muslims in China, 700,000 live in Yunnan China’s south-west region.
