WEIZHOU, China -- A newspaper of the ruling Communist Party said Saturday that no religion is above the law in China, urging officials to stay firm while dealing with a rare protest over the planned demolition of a mosque in the northwest.
The Global Times said that local officials in the town of Weizhou in Ningxia, a region that's home to many ethnic minority Hui Muslims, must act against what it described as an illegal expansion of a religious building.
Thousands of Hui people gathered at the towering Grand Mosque on Thursday and Friday to prevent authorities from demolishing the structure, residents contacted by The Associated Press said. It was a rare, public pushback to the party's efforts to rewrite how religions are practiced in the country.
The protest comes as faith groups that were largely tolerated in the past have seen their freedoms shrink as the government seeks to "Sinicize" religions by making the faithful prioritize allegiance to the officially atheist Communist Party. Islamic crescents and domes have been stripped from mosques, Christian churches have been shut down and Bibles seized, and Tibetan children have been moved from Buddhist temples to schools.
Such efforts were clearly behind the planned demolition of the mosque in Weizhou, where dozens of men, women and children milled about on the mosque steps, on plastic chairs and in the large dirt parking lot early Saturday before dawn prayers. Above them hung long banners from the second story of the mosque that read in Chinese: "Stick to directives of Sinicized religion."
The mosque, an imposing white building lit at night with gold, green and yellow, dwarfs the surrounding dim warren of brick and concrete homes. Its architecture of four minarets and nine domes tipped with crescent moons would be at home anywhere in the Islamic world, save for the large red and yellow Chinese flags fluttering from the ramparts and the wide central staircase.
Early Saturday morning, men in plainclothes, including one who identified himself as police, prevented AP reporters from conducting interviews at the mosque and chased them away.
Later Saturday, police stopped the reporters at a checkpoint in the direction of the mosque and detained them for more than an hour before ordering them to turn around, and tailing them with two cars to ensure they did not change course.
Officials in the county and city propaganda offices said they were not aware of the situation. Other local authorities could not immediately be reached for comment.
But the Global Times newspaper said in an editorial Saturday that the authorities had to send a message to all religious groups that none of them are above the law.
"Demolishing the mosque is sure to earn the ire of local religious followers. However, if the local government does not react to the illegal act, it will fuel the idea that religions are superior over China's laws," the paper said.
Information for this article was contributed by Fu Ting of The Associated Press.
A Section on 08/12/2018