Poet fears for his people as China ‘Sinicizes’ religion

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In this Sept. 28, 2018, photo, a motorcyclist passes by the Nandashi Great Southern Mosque, built in the 15th century in Jinan in China's eastern province of Shandong, where an ancient Muslim minority known as the Hui have lived for centuries. (AP)
Updated 28 December 2018
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Poet fears for his people as China ‘Sinicizes’ religion

  • In Beijing, Arabic signs mark Hui bakeries, teahouses, halal restaurants and a thousand-year old mosque bustling with activity in the historically Islamic neighborhood of Niujie
  • Hundreds of Hui flocked to the mosque’s courtyard for a rarity in China: a political protest. City authorities detained AP journalists and prevented them from conducting interviews at the mosque

JINAN, China: Cui Haoxin is too young to remember the days of his people’s oppression under Mao Zedong.
The 39-year-old poet was born after the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when the Hui — China’s second-largest Muslim ethnic group — were among the masses tormented by the Red Guard.
In the years since, the Hui (pronounced HWAY) generally have been supportive of the government and mostly spared the kind of persecution endured by China’s largest Muslim group, the Uighur.
There are signs, though, that that is changing. Cui fears both that history may be repeating itself and for his own safety as he tries to hold the ruling Communist Party accountable.
In August, town officials in the Hui region of Ningxia issued a demolition order for the landmark Grand Mosque in Weizhou, though they later backed off in the face of protests.
More recently, authorities in nearby Gansu province ordered closed a school that taught Arabic, the language of the Qur’an and other Islamic religious texts. The school had employed and served mainly Hui since 1984. And a Communist Party official from Ningxia visited Xinjiang, center of Uighur oppression, to “study and investigate how Xinjiang fights terrorism and legally manages religious affairs.”
China under President Xi Jinping is clamping down on minorities, tightening control over a wide spectrum of religious and political activity. In some places, a campaign to “Sinicize” religion has prompted authorities to seize Bibles, remove the “halal” designation from food products, demolish churches and strip mosques of loudspeakers and Islamic crescents and domes.
Cui has spoken out against government intrusions. He is working on a novel with a nightmarish plot: believers are brutalized by demons in a Cultural Revolution in Hell. “The Muslims resisted and tried to protect the mosque,” he said, describing the work. “They failed.”
He worries that violence lies ahead.
“One has dignity. For a person, it is his or her bottom-line.” he said. “If the persecution is too unbearable, if something happens, as I said, there could be a disaster.”

Cui speaks eloquently about his people, who claim descent from Persian and Arab traders who came to China 1,300 years ago.
The 10 million Hui living across China generally speak Mandarin — Cui is a former teacher of the standard Chinese dialect — and follow many Chinese cultural practices. They enjoy relative freedom of worship compared to the Uighurs, some of whom call the Hui “tawuz,” which means watermelon in the Uighur’s Turkic language.
“Green or Islamic on the outside, and red or Communist on the inside,” writes University of Toronto professor Isabelle Cote in a study on Uighur attacks on Hui in Xinjiang from 2009 to 2013. Farther back, Hui served Chinese emperors as shock troops repressing Uighur rebellions.
In Beijing, Arabic signs mark Hui bakeries, teahouses, halal restaurants and a thousand-year old mosque bustling with activity in the historically Islamic neighborhood of Niujie.
Ma Changli, who has run a butcher shop in the enclave for the past five years, said police help provide security for Friday prayers at the mosque.
“Our country has always been pretty supportive to our worship,” the 39-year-old butcher said, standing in front of an Islamic inscription and hanging lamb and beef racks.
While the Hui face prejudice from the Han Chinese majority, they are proud to be Chinese and have a “positive outlook for the future,” said David Stroup, a University of Oklahoma professor who met Hui across China in 2016.
Many saw an opportunity in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion trade and infrastructure initiative that runs across several Muslim-majority nations in central Asia and Africa, he said. They aspired to become middlemen on a revived Silk Road linking China with Islamic nations.
“It was going to be an opportunity for the Hui to play an important role as ambassadors to the Islamic world,” Stroup said.
It came as a shock, he said, when new regulations targeted the practices of Hui alongside those of other religious groups earlier this year. Stroup said the shift has dampened optimism in a community that saw language and religion as links to trading partners in the Muslim world.

Tension bubbled up in August in Weizhou, a dusty Muslim-majority town in China’s northwestern “Qur’an Belt.”
The town’s pride and joy is a gleaming white mosque with four minarets and nine domes tipped with crescent moons that dwarfs a surrounding warren of brick and concrete homes.
Officials issued a demolition order for the Grand Mosque, alleging it had been “illegally expanded” and adding that 1.07 million yuan ($154,765) from foreign sources had been received by four local mosques — financing that would be illegal under Chinese law.
Hundreds of Hui flocked to the mosque’s courtyard for a rarity in China: a political protest. City authorities detained AP journalists and prevented them from conducting interviews at the mosque.
The protesters’ success was even rarer. The mosque remained unscathed, if draped in a banner reading in Chinese: “Stick to directives of Sinicized religion.”
Weeks later, a top Communist propaganda official in Ningxia blamed the incident on “an oversimplified administrative decision” by local authorities.
“It originally should not have happened,” Bai Shangcheng, director-general of the regional Communist Party department that oversees religious groups, said at a news conference in Beijing.
Dissent simmered quietly in the Hui community after the mosque incident, according to Cui, who circumvented China’s Internet censorship to tweet about the protest and feed video to a Turkish television station.
In late November, the Communist Party-run Global Times reported that Ningxia had signed an anti-terrorism cooperation agreement with Xinjiang during a visit by Ningxia Communist Party head Zhang Yunsheng.
China has set up a vast security apparatus in Xinjiang with pervasive police checkpoints and surveillance cameras. By some estimates, more than 1 million Uighurs and Kazakhs have been detained in internment camps in a crackdown on extremism. Two former camp detainees have told the AP that some Hui have been swept up in the clampdown too.
The order to close the Arabic language school came early this month, the Global Times reported. An unnamed expert in Beijing told the newspaper that teaching Arabic sometimes arouses public concern if it crosses over into preaching religious content.
The article quoted China’s education law: “The State separates education from religion.”

Cui is one of the few Chinese citizens disturbed enough — and brave enough — to criticize the Communist Party openly. For that, he has experienced censorship, detention, and “home visits” by police.
He spoke to The Associated Press at his home in Jinan, a city in eastern China where his family traces its roots back five centuries. Skyscrapers dwarf old mosques and boisterous halal restaurants with gold domes, Arabic script and crescents.
He doesn’t drink alcohol or eat pork, but neither does he pray five times a day. His bedside table is stacked with poetry and novels, not religious books. Hanging in the living room is a framed red embroidery by his mother of the Islamic profession of faith in yellow Arabic stitching.
It was underneath this tapestry that police entered his home earlier this year to demand he stop criticizing the government online. Cui posts attacks on Beijing’s policies related to Muslims in China and abroad, such as the government’s support of Myanmar despite widespread criticism of its treatment of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority.
A few months later, on Nov. 27, police brought him to the local Public Security Bureau for a few hours of questioning. A recent Human Rights Watch report said that China started in November “targeting Twitter users in China as part of a nationwide crackdown on social media.” Cui refused to stop or delete his tweets.
Sixty years ago, Communist Party cadres descended on the historically Hui city of Linxia to excise “superstitions” in the city in a “struggle against the privileges of feudalism and religion,” according to a 2016 book by Matthew Erie, an Oxford University professor of modern China studies.
Red Guards lit bonfires with wood from demolished mosques and tombs, Erie writes in “China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law.” They forced Muslims to wear signs reading “enemies of the state.”
Cui fears the current crackdown on religion will return China to those days of blood.
At a teahouse in Jinan, as steam from his jasmine tea mixes with the scent from a tray of sweets, he recites from his poem “Letter from Prison:“
“It seems like I can see the bulldozer running wild in the Thousand and One Nights.
The angel upon my shoulder urges me: ‘Tell the truth under the grey sky.’“


Gaza heritage and destruction on display in Paris

Updated 04 April 2025
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Gaza heritage and destruction on display in Paris

  • Bouffard said the damage to the known sites as well as treasures potentially hidden in unexplored Palestinian land “depends on the bomb tonnage and their impact on the surface and underground”

PARIS: A new exhibition opening in Paris on Friday showcases archaeological artifacts from Gaza, once a major commercial crossroads between Asia and Africa, whose heritage has been ravaged by Israel’s ongoing onslaught.
Around a hundred artifacts, including a 4,000-year-old bowl, a sixth-century mosaic from a Byzantine church and a Greek-inspired statue of Aphrodite, are on display at the Institut du Monde Arabe.
The rich and mixed collection speaks to Gaza’s past as a cultural melting pot, but the show’s creators also wanted to highlight the contemporary destruction caused by the war, sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023.
“The priority is obviously human lives, not heritage,” said Elodie Bouffard, curator of the exhibition, which is titled “Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History.”
“But we also wanted to show that, for millennia, Gaza was the endpoint of caravan routes, a port that minted its own currency, and a city that thrived at the meeting point of water and sand,” she told AFP.
One section of the exhibition documents the extent of recent destruction.
Using satellite image, the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO has already identified damage to 94 heritage sites in Gaza, including the 13th-century Pasha’s Palace.
Bouffard said the damage to the known sites as well as treasures potentially hidden in unexplored Palestinian land “depends on the bomb tonnage and their impact on the surface and underground.”
“For now, it’s impossible to assess.”
The attacks by Hamas militants on Israel in 2023 left 1,218 dead. In retaliation, Israeli operations have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and devastated the densely populated territory.

The story behind “Gaza’s Treasures” is inseparable from the ongoing wars in the Middle East.
At the end of 2024, the Institut du Monde Arabe was finalizing an exhibition on artifacts from the archaeological site of Byblos in Lebanon, but Israeli bombings on Beirut made the project impossible.
“It came to a sudden halt, but we couldn’t allow ourselves to be discouraged,” said Bouffard.
The idea of an exhibition on Gaza’s heritage emerged.
“We had just four and a half months to put it together. That had never been done before,” she explained.
Given the impossibility of transporting artifacts out of Gaza, the Institut turned to 529 pieces stored in crates in a specialized Geneva art warehouse since 2006. The works belong to the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank.

The Oslo Accords of 1993, signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, helped secure some of Gaza’s treasures.
In 1995, Gaza’s Department of Antiquities was established, which oversaw the first archaeological digs in collaboration with the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EBAF).
Over the years, excavations uncovered the remains of the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, the ancient Greek port of Anthedon, and a Roman necropolis — traces of civilizations spanning from the Bronze Age to Ottoman influences in the late 19th century.
“Between Egypt, Mesopotamian powers, and the Hasmoneans, Gaza has been a constant target of conquest and destruction throughout history,” Bouffard noted.
In the 4th century BC, Greek leader Alexander the Great besieged the city for two months, leaving behind massacres and devastation.
Excavations in Gaza came to a standstill when Hamas took power in 2007 and Israel imposed a blockade.
Land pressure and rampant building in one of the world’s most densely populated areas has also complicated archaeological work.
And after a year and a half of war, resuming excavations seems like an ever-more distant prospect.
The exhibition runs until November 2, 2025.
 

 


US tariffs take aim everywhere, including uninhabited islands

Updated 03 April 2025
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US tariffs take aim everywhere, including uninhabited islands

  • The Australian territory in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean was slapped with 10% tariffs on all its exports

WASHINGTON: The world’s remotest corners couldn’t hide from US President Donald Trump’s global tariffs onslaught Wednesday — even the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands.
The Australian territory in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean was slapped with 10 percent tariffs on all its exports, despite the icy archipelago having zero residents — other than many seals, penguins and other birds.
Strings of ocean specks around the globe, including Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands and the Comoros off the coast of Africa, were likewise subjected to 10 percent new tariffs.
Another eye-catching inclusion in the tariffs list was Myanmar, which is digging out from an earthquake that left nearly 3,000 people dead, and whose exports to the United States will now face 44 percent in new levies.
Britain’s Falkland Islands — population 3,200 people and around one million penguins — got particular punishment.
The South Atlantic territory — mostly famous for a 1982 war fought by Britain to expel an Argentinian invasion — was walloped with tariffs of 41 percent on exports to the United States.
The Falklands’ would-be ruler Argentina only faces 10 percent new tariffs.
According to the Falklands Chamber of Commerce, the territory is ranked 173 in the world in terms of global exports, with only $306 million of products exported in 2019. This included $255 million in exports of mollusks and $30 million of frozen fish.


Australia PM Albanese falls off stage during election campaign event

Updated 03 April 2025
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Australia PM Albanese falls off stage during election campaign event

  • Albanese was posing for photos following his speech when he stepped back and lost his footing
  • Albanese promptly got back on his feet and gestured to the crowd with two hands that he was fine

SYDNEY: Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared to fall off a stage on Thursday during a campaign event for May’s national election, but quickly recovered and insisted he was “sweet” afterwards.
The leader of the center-left Labor party, 62, was posing for photos following his speech at the Mining and Energy Union Conference held in New South Wales, when he stepped back and lost his footing, drawing gasps from the audience.
Albanese promptly got back on his feet and gestured to the crowd with two hands that he was fine.
Video footage from the event showed Albanese had tumbled off the stage, although he shrugged off the incident when asked about it during a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“I stepped back one step. I didn’t fall off the stage ... just one leg went down, but I was sweet,” he said.
Albanese is currently on the campaign trail for an election on May 3. The Labor party is running neck-and-neck in opinion polls with the conservative Liberal-National opposition led by Peter Dutton.


Starbucks faces new hot spill lawsuit weeks after $50m ruling

Updated 02 April 2025
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Starbucks faces new hot spill lawsuit weeks after $50m ruling

  • The suit, filed at the city’s superior court, claims one of the cups in her order was not properly secured
  • The negligence suit seeks unspecified general and special damages

LOS ANGELES: Starbucks was facing another lawsuit over a spilled hot drink Wednesday, just weeks after a court ordered the coffee giant to pay $50 million to a man who was injured by a cup of tea.
A lawsuit lodged in California claims Sabrina Michelle Hermes was seriously hurt when hot liquid tipped into her lap at a drive-through in Norwalk, near Los Angeles, two years ago.
The suit, filed at the city’s superior court, claims one of the cups in her order was not properly secured when it was handed to her, and the drink sloshed out onto her legs, a hip, a knee and her feet, causing severe injuries.
Starbucks “owed a duty to exercise reasonable care with respect to the preparation, handling and service of hot beverages so as to prevent them from spilling onto and injuring customers such as plaintiff,” the suit says.
The negligence suit seeks unspecified general and special damages, including reimbursement for past and future medical costs and lost earnings.
A spokesperson for Starbucks told AFP on Wednesday the company would be contesting the claim.
“We have always been committed to the highest safety standards in our stores, including the handling of hot drinks,” the spokesperson said.
“We are aware of Ms. Hermes’ claims and firmly believe they are without merit. We look forward to presenting our case in court.”
Last month a jury in Los Angeles ordered the firm to pay $50 million to delivery driver Michael Garcia, who suffered burns when a super-sized drink spilled in his lap at a drive-through.
Garcia’s lawyers claimed the server who handed him three large drinks in February 2020 did not push one of them into the cardboard cupholder properly.
Starbucks said at the time of the ruling that it would appeal the award, which it said was “excessive.”
A landmark legal ruling against McDonalds in New Mexico in 1994 established something of a precedent for Americans suing fast food companies when 79-year-old Stella Liebeck was awarded over $2.8 million after spilling hot coffee on herself.
Although the award was reduced on appeal, the case was often cited as an example of the need to reform US tort laws.


Slovakia allows culling 350 bears, riles conservationists

Updated 02 April 2025
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Slovakia allows culling 350 bears, riles conservationists

  • Fico’s government has also declared a state of emergency in most Slovak districts over “undesirable” bear presence
  • The Slovak parliament already eased the rules for bear culling in May 2024

BRATISLAVA: The Slovak government on Wednesday approved the shooting of 350 bears citing danger posed to people, a move conservationists slammed as unlawful.
The decision follows several bear attacks on people, including the discovery of the remains of a man in central Slovakia probably killed by a bear on Sunday.
“We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go to the woods,” Prime Minister Robert Fico told reporters.
Fico’s government has also declared a state of emergency in most Slovak districts over “undesirable” bear presence.


The Slovak parliament already eased the rules for bear culling in May 2024, allowing exemptions from a ban in several districts.
But the country must follow an EU directive that allows culling only of problem bears damaging property or attacking people, and only if there is no other solution.
A total of 93 bears were shot in the EU member country of 5.4 million people in 2024, while 36 died in car accidents, the daily Dennik N said earlier.
But journalists from the Jan Kuciak Investigative Center said hunters probably never killed bears that had attacked people, based on a study of 50 cases from 2024.
Environment Minister Tomas Taraba said on Wednesday there were more than 1,300 bears in Slovakia, and that 800 was a “sufficient number,” as the population keeps growing.
But conservationists criticized the government, saying Wednesday’s decision was in violation of international obligations and that the environment ministry knowingly breached the law.
They called on the ministry to instead teach people how to stay safe in nature.
“Instead of ineffective solutions, we need to strengthen prevention — education, provision of garbage removal, regulation of baiting of game or informing the public about safe movement in nature,” the Aevis Foundation said on Facebook.