Walking through Nagu, a small town in the mountains of southwest China, the signs of a vibrant Muslim community are ever-present. Passages from a Chinese translation of the Koran are broadcast over loudspeakers. Women in headscarves bring noisy children home from school. Arabic script adorns the outside of houses.
Towering above it all is the Najiaying Mosque, a white building with an emerald dome and four minarets that soar 230 feet into the air. For decades, the mosque has been the pride of the Hui Muslim ethnic minority who live here.
It was also the scene of a confrontation last month.
On the morning of May 27, after authorities drove construction cranes into the mosque’s courtyard, a crowd confronted the hundreds of police officers in riot gear who had been deployed to oversee the work. When officers blocked the mosque and used pepper spray, residents threw water bottles and bricks.
The rare clashes, described in interviews with eyewitnesses and captured in videos posted on social media, show how one aspect of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to exert greater control over religion could be gaining momentum.
The party has done so since China’s leader Xi Jinping came to power more than a decade ago tore off Christian churches destroyed Tibetan Buddhist enclaves and lay Uyghur Muslims in detention camps in the name of political security. But it also targets lesser-known groups, including the Hui, who make up less than 1 percent of the population and have historically assimilated well with the ethnic Han majority.
The party has systematically closed, demolished or forcibly remodeled mosques in Hui enclaves across the country and denounced Arabic architectural features such as domes and minarets as evidence of unwanted foreign influence on Islam in China. Resistance was limited and the mosque in Nagu, along with another large mosque in the nearby town of Shadian, is one of the last large mosques with such architecture still standing in China.
But when local officials announced plans to remove the domes of both mosques and redesign their minarets in a supposedly more “Chinese” style, the people of Nagu fought back.
“This roof represents our respect and our freedom. We chose it ourselves at the time,” said Mr. Na, a Hui resident in his 30s, who asked to be identified by his last name only, fearing government retaliation. His family, like many others in the city, had helped fund the mosque’s recent renovations in the early 2000s, when the minarets were added. “Now they’re saying, ‘My rule takes precedence over your free will.'”
The mosques in Nagu and Shadian have a special significance in the history of Beijing’s relationship with Islam, which oscillated between conflict and coexistence. Yunnan Province, home to both Nagu and Shadian, is China’s most ethnically diverse province, and the Hui people—most of whom speak Mandarin but are characterized by their Muslim faith—have lived there for centuries. The earliest version of the Nagu Mosque was built in the 14th century in traditional Chinese court style. Yunnan’s Muslims prospered as merchants, trading with Southeast Asia.
Then, after the communist takeover, officials began to attack the religion as counter-revolutionary, particularly during the period of political upheaval from 1966 to 1976 known as the Cultural Revolution. Muslims in Shadian resisted, and in 1975 the military destroyed the town and massacred up to 1,600 residents.
After the Cultural Revolution, when China opened up to the world, the government apologized for the massacre. It aided in the reconstruction of Shadian and enabled the locals – many of whom were able to travel abroad for the first time – to build the Grand Mosque, the largest in southwest China, in their current Arabic style. The building is modeled after the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina in Saudi Arabia and can accommodate 10,000 people. The minarets are visible from afar. Officials advertised it as a tourist attraction.
The Nagu Mosque, 90 miles from Shadian, also grew and developed into a regional training center for imams. As the locals from the 1980s added a dome and other Arab features, the government has not intervened. In 2018, the local government made it one cultural relic.
“These mosques symbolize that the Chinese government has accepted that they did wrong during the Cultural Revolution,” he said Ruslan Yusupov, a China and Islam scholar at Harvard University. The Shadian Mosque in particular serves as a reminder “both of violence and of state-sponsored reconstruction”.
But in recent years the restrictions on Islam have increased again, especially after a Attack 2014 An attack on civilians at a train station in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, killed 31 people. The Chinese government said the attackers were Uighur separatists had spent time on Shadian.
Officials stopped promoting Shadian. In Nagu, teachers are forbidden from wearing headscarves at school, local residents said. A group of volunteers stopped offering free tutoring at the mosque there after the authorities tightened controls on the education system.
In 2021, the so-called Sinicization campaign to remove Arabic features arrived in Nagu. Government officials began visiting homes, sometimes daily, to persuade residents to support changes to the mosque. The government’s plan is reflected on a billboard in the city: the dome has disappeared, the minarets are decorated with pagoda-like steps. Officials also recently went door to door in Shadian.
“Because of the sheer authority these places hold in the mind” of local Muslims, “they had to leave these two mosques until the end,” Mr Yusupov said.
For Hui residents in Nagu, which the New York Times visited shortly after the protest, the remodeling plan heralded broader repression of their way of life.
A woman in her 30s, also surnamed Na — a common surname in Nagu — said she grew up playing and studying in the mosque. Neighbors and relatives had attended university elsewhere in China but returned to Nagu for the small-town, devout atmosphere, where they could instill Muslim values in their children.
Ms. Na said she would be willing to accept the removal of the dome in isolation: “Our faith is in our hearts, this is just a building.” But she feared it would not stop there, especially after seeing the authorities’ violent tactics had seen.
“The first step is exterior renovations,” she said. “The second step will ask you to delete the Arabic writing that we have on each house.”
The authorities are not giving up. Several hours after the start of the altercation, the police withdrew from the mosque before midday prayer. But the next day, the local authorities reported issued a notice They denounce the “serious disturbance of the social order” and promise a “tough crackdown”. In the days that followed, local officials blared the notice repeatedly over loudspeakers, including late into the night.
Islamophobic comments, including from pro-government commentators, have piled up on China’s heavily censored social media platforms.
In Nagu, residents entered and exited the mosque, but security remained tight and a drone flew overhead. Plainclothes police officers approached a reporter from the Times and had her driven out of town.
Authorities in Shadian were also on high alert and officers intercepted the reporter at the train station. Still, they agreed to take her to the Grand Mosque.
“Of course, the Qur’an originated in Saudi Arabia, but after arriving in China, it has to adapt,” said Li Heng, an official with the local Bureau of Ethnic and Religious Affairs, while standing in the square in front of the mosque.
“When our imams preach sermons,” he said, “they have to integrate the core socialist values that the government promotes.”
Mr. Li insisted that the officials did not interfere with freedom of religion and that the plan could only be implemented with the consent of local people.
He added, “Patriotism is the highest form of religious belief.”
Back in Nagu, the cranes remained in the courtyard of the mosque for several days after the collision. The demolition was probably inevitable, said Mr. Na, the Hui resident. However, he hoped residents could hold on to other freedoms they didn’t want to give up. For him, this also included the right to pass on his religion to his children.
“If you can’t protect your bottom line, others will see you as someone who doesn’t have a bottom line,” he said, “and they’ll trample on it over and over again.”
Li you And Joy Dong contributed to the research.
