China Is Taking a Wrecking Ball to Famous Mosques

On July 8, three coaches full of Hui Muslims, China’s largest Islamic minority, returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca to their hometown of Shadian, in the southwestern province of Yunnan. The return from the Hajj, Islam’s holiest journey, is usually a joyous time—but when they returned, they found Shadian’s grand mosque closed, lights off and doors shut. Relatives waiting to greet them confirmed their worst fears: Local officials had closed the mosque in order to demolish the dome and minarets.

The partial destruction of the mosque is part of a wider campaign that mixes Islamophobia and xenophobia, and which has led to the demolition or partial demolition of Islamic sites throughout China. While the western province of Xinjiang remains ground zero for the crackdown, the government’s measures are increasingly targeting the larger Muslim community. Domes and minarets, dubbed as a sign of foreign influence, have been particularly targeted—in part to appease an increasingly Islamophobic public.

Shadian is a particularly fraught location for this campaign. The town is infamous for a 1975 attack, including artillery shelling, by the People’s Liberation Army that killed around 1,600 locals in response to protests against the religious destruction of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). During the period of limited apology and reconciliation that followed the Cultural Revolution, the government issued a letter of redress in 1979, setting out to turn the town into a symbol of Hui culture and a tourist destination.

The renovation of the Grand Mosque of Shadian began in 2003, at a time when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was using infrastructure development as a form of statecraft and national integration. In regions such as Yunnan that have a large percentage of ethnic minorities, this meant promoting minority culture through tourism. The mosque was built with funds that came from the community, and its design had to be approved by the city-level CCP authorities. The mosque’s design intentionally attracted the gaze and curiosity of Han tourists when it reopened in 2010. An absence of any walls around the mosque also made it accessible for touring to non-Muslims.

Shadian’s mosque is an icon of Hui pride and was once a symbol of a party that seemed willing to leave the chaos of the Cultural Revolution behind. In a society in which the state heavily enforces the primacy of Han Chinese culture, and where ethnic and religious minorities are often reduced to token performances, the mosque provided a rare avenue of cross-cultural communication.

But any “non-Chinese” forms of cultural expression are now risky. While the Communist Party has always sharply limited religious freedom, anti-religious efforts, especially against ethnic minorities, have increased dramatically under President Xi Jinping. The directive to “merge religious doctrines with Chinese culture” was first outlined during a seminal April 2016 conference on religion chaired by Xi. In 2018, that directive became the ideological basis of a five-year policy plan for “persisting in the Sinification of Islam.” These efforts, which claim that China is under the threat of “Saudization, Arabization, and Halalization,” have most brutally impacted Xinjiang, where more than a million Muslim Uyghurs are detained in internment camps or the prison system, women are forcibly sterilized, and ages-old religious shrines are erased.

But the same efforts are having lesser-known impacts among China’s other minority Muslim communities, resulting in the removal of Arabic “halal” signs from the Hui Muslim food outlets and comestibles, banning Hui Muslim minors from learning scriptures or entering religious buildings, and most recently, the demolition of key features of mosques.

Islam in China dates back nearly 1,500 years but is now increasingly portrayed as a foreign faith. The position has swung wildly over the past decade, from active cooperation with Saudi influence and attempts by Muslim communities, including Shadian, to adapt to the authorities’ demands, to the violently Islamophobic turn since 2017. Government propaganda has found willing takers among the public, where anti-Muslim rumors are common and popular campaigns have caused, for instance, food delivery apps to remove halal options. The Twitter-like Weibo account of Xi Wuyi, a self-reported atheist scholar of Marxism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, frequently reposts pictures of veiled women and criticizes these public expressions of Islam as religious extremism.

Hundreds of mosques in the Hui communities living across China have also seen their minarets and domes removed because the government sees them as elements of so-called foreign architecture. Reports of similar measures from the Henan and Shandong provinces suggest the planned extent of this campaign. Minority ethnicity and religious cultures in general are under attack, from cross-removal campaigns targeting Christians to the attempt to crush languages such as Mongolian.

China’s mosques used to be a diplomatic tool as part of the country’s outreach efforts to the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world. Today, faced with a decision between ideological security at home and diplomacy abroad, Beijing has predictably chosen the first. Hosting Muslim leaders in mosques was once common, whether in Shadian, Xi’an, or Beijing. In June 2013, three months after Xi assumed the presidency, Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad was taken to Shadian. Honghe Daily reported that the visit aimed to “discuss cooperation with Malaysia in the spheres of tourism and trade.” Mahathir reportedly prayed in the mosque, took pictures of it, and planted a tree in its courtyard.

Another friendly visit to the mosque was arranged by the provincial-level authorities in 2016 for a delegation from the Middle East. Led by Tunisia’s minister of religious affairs, Abul Jalil bin Salem, the delegation included representatives from Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and United Aran Emirates. Photos from the visit showed them touring the mosque, taking ablution, and exchanging Qurans with Chen Guangyuan, then the leader of the Chinese Islamic Association. While Islamic visitors are still taken to Potemkin events such as Ramadan celebrations, even as fasting is targeted by official campaigns, Shadian seems unlikely to feature on that agenda again.

At home, the authorities sometimes attempted compromises with believers in the past. More hard-line policy has now made that increasingly difficult, whether handled by the local government or by central groups such as the State Administration of Religious Affairs—absorbed into the United Front Work Department, which is charged with ideological conformity and the primacy of the party, in 2018.

The demolitions in Shadian came just one month after clashes broke out in the nearby Nagu township, following a forceful attempt to implement the Sinification of their main mosque. On June 15, an announcement made by the Najiaying mosque circulated online. In it, the management committee and supervisory board jointly agreed to “take responsibility for carrying out the alteration work.” The announcement further described that the work would last for six months and would not affect the daily prayer activities. The fierce confrontation with the police force, which is rare in China, was captured on eyewitness photos and videos that were quickly leaked to Twitter and YouTube.

Residents who spoke with me claimed that the announcement in Najiayang was a bargain between the mosque and the local government to try to reduce resistance—mixed with the arrest of protesters. A restaurant owner in his 40s who asked (like many other interviewees) only to be identified by his family name, Ma, said that “after the protest, the authorities apprehended several dozen people. Imam Ma Zichang, for example, the one who began chanting ‘God is great’ in front of the police, was charged with the crime of disturbing social order.” On June 17, two days after the announcement, the cranes that stood idle in the mosque courtyard all this time began working again.

Officials eager to avoid repeating Najiaying’s protests went door to door asking civil servants, such as teachers, to sign a letter agreeing “not to take pictures of and not to post on social media news about the mosque alteration work,” according to one female teacher, Wang, in her 30s. Those who are not on a government payroll said they were asked bluntly if they would come to the streets and protest the alteration. “I said I disagree with the alteration,” one resident, Sha, said, “but I also said that I would not obstruct the work.”

“The mosque needs neither repair nor change,” one resident who requested anonymity said, “but the working team encouraged the committee managers to get hold of the opportunity and report any other issue that needs attention or fixing.” Because the lack of respect by the workers was the alleged cause of clashes in Najiaying, the officials in Shadian reportedly promised that they would “instruct the workers this time to respect local customs and allow no consumption of alcohol or pork.”

But these are ultimately window-dressing on a campaign already disrupting religious life. While the mosque is temporarily closed for the duration of the renovations, the playground of the madrasa that stands behind it has been converted into a temporary place of worship. Photos showed a wide space with a wooden floor under a tent with a metal roof. In the middle of this “prayground” is the elaborate Quran stand that used to occupy the center of the prayer hall in the mosque. “The government made this space to show they care about our worship, but what difference will it make? We feel scattered; we feel dislocated,” one resident said.

As the government closed the mosque, people took to the media to express their grief and bid farewell to it. Some posted pictures of what the mosque looked like in the past. Others reposted promotional videos of famous Chinese vloggers who had visited it before. “I have a thousand kinds of sadness in my heart,” one of the users said in a comment added to the panoramic image of the mosque with the Chinese flag in front of it, “but I can’t talk about it. Not only because the words can’t express the loss, but also because of fear of retaliation. I can only wet my eyes.”

One photo that went locally viral captured a banner that promoted freedom, harmony, democracy, equality, rule of law, and civility, among other “core socialist” values championed by the CCP. The banner used to stand in the mosque’s courtyard, but due to the erection of a hoarding wall on July 12, it now stood alone in front of a six-foot high barrier that symbolized the mosque’s closure.

“That this mosque never had a wall was meant to express harmony and welcome everyone who wanted to see it,” one resident commented by reposting the photo on WeChat.

Another commented: “The photo captures the whole irony of the situation, for the wall now isolates the faithful from these values. They always promote these values to you, but they also keep you away from them.”