David Fishman Profile picture
Apr 23, 2023 34 tweets 14 min read Read on X
Renovation of Two Chinese Hui Mosques in Yunnan and Sichuan: On-the-Ground Observations

Background: The last time I visited Dali was 2015. I rented an e-bike and went up Erhai Lake, taking pics and checking out small villages.

One of those was Meiba Village 美坝村 Image
I had stopped there because Ctrip informed me there was a minor tourist attraction in the village - the Meiba Mosque.

I was curious, because as far as I knew, Dali is a region of the Bai ethnicity, (白族) and the Bai people aren't Muslims. But this was clearly a Muslim village. Image
Turns out it was not Bai, but a Hui village, so there you go.

The mosque was small. The front building was white, matching the local Bai architecture, with gold and green highlights, some Islamic window styling, a green dome & symmetrical green-accented minarets.

(2015 pic) Image
Stepping through that front building into the courtyard, the back prayer hall was a small rectangular building, looking like a Chinese temple with more green accents in the walls and doorway.

(2015 pic) (my goodness the weather was nice that day) Image
Unfortunately I had no idea in 2015 I'd write about it in 2023. I didn't even use Twitter then...

Over the years, I have cleaned my camera roll for space, so I only have these few pics of Meiba village left, including this last shot of one of the minarets.

(2015 pic) Image
On Sohu, I found a travel blog of someone who had also visited the village in 2015, and had some additional pictures of Meiba, its mosque, and the prayer room - and interviewed people too.

Mosque in background of first picture.

sohu.com/a/31891516_115… ImageImageImageImage
Anyway. Over last few years, with so much discussion about how Chinese gov't was targeting foreign-styled mosques for renovations, I've thought about the Meiba Mosque, with its dome and minarets...

I saw in 2020 it was removed from Ctrip, and was also no longer on Baidu Maps
And then in 2020, the travel site Yunnan Explorer posted a pic of the Meiba Mosque seemingly amidst renovations...the dome was already gone and the minarets were being taken down too.

(This pic of the front building was taken from the courtyard with back against prayer hall) Image
Fast-forward to 2023.

Last week while in Dali, I noticed the Meiba Village Mosque was now back on Baidu Maps!

So we decided to visit and see what it's like now.

As expected, the dome & minarets have now been replaced by pagoda-like structures and the Islamic styling is GONE. Image
Passing through the entrance into the courtyard, the back prayer hall has been completely leveled and rebuilt as a much larger, two-story structure based on Chinese temple elements.

This looked very new - completed in the last six months perhaps. Image
When we went, there were children running around the village and playing in the mosque courtyard. The boys all wore little taquiyah.

Some of the nicer houses had fancy entrance archways with Arabic (?) over the doorways. Otherwise it looked like the other Bai villages. Image
In the courtyard entrance was a list of villagers and how much they had donated for zakat (it was Ramadan at the time). 200-300 CNY seemed the norm.

Notice nearly everyone is surnamed Ma 马, the dominant Hui surname. Image
Besides the renovated exteriors, and the new, large prayer room, there were several HUGE new houses and the roads were all paved vs. last time. And very clean.

It was late afternoon and there were only a few children around, no one to ask questions, so we just got pics and left. Image
Next: Weizhou Town, Wenchuan County, Sichuan

I found myself in Weizhou by accident...because I missed an exit on the highway.

Believe me, you do NOT want to miss an exit in Western Sichuan...the next exit was 30+ km!

Since I had come all this way, I decide to explore a bit... Image
There's not much in Weizhou Town - I visited a museum and a few parks and in 30 mins I'd just about seen the whole place.

On my way out, I saw the local mosque on Baidu. The street view pic was from 2016, and it had green domes, so I expected it would have some changes too. Image
Sure enough, when I arrived, I found the entire roof had been changed, with the domes replaced with pagodas and the green + gold aesthetic swapped for a modern Chinese color palette.

I had to check the old pics several times to ensure I was aligning correctly.

2016 | 2023 ImageImageImageImage
I stopped to grab a bite at the halal restaurant on the street in front of the building and ask the ladies there some questions.

"Hey is this a mosque? Baidu says it's a mosque, but it doesn't look like one"
"Yes, this is the Weizhou Mosque"
"Oh good, I couldn't tell at first" Image
"What happened to the building? It looks very different from the pictures on Baidu"
"Oh, the government renovated the mosque"

"When?"
"Last few years"

"Why?"
"I don't know. They said it needs to look more Chinese. They spent a lot of money on the renovation...2-3 million RMB" Image
"Oh...are there many Hui in Wenchuan? I suppose not many?"
"No, not many. Very few. Less than a thousand I guess"

(Wenchuan County is part of Aba Prefecture, a Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Region in Western Sichuan; Weizhou is the county seat. Most people here are Qiang 羌族)
"After renovations, it's still used as a mosque?"
"Yes. Hui people pray here, and have activities. It's Ramadan now."

"When the government did the renovations, did they change anything inside?"
"Oh, no, it's all the same as before."

(I saw a Ramadan fast schedule): Image
She gestures to a passage on the side of the kitchen. "That leads into the mosque. You can go look inside if you're interested".

I venture tentatively down the hallway, emerging in a tidy courtyard in front of a large building. There's a bucket of potatoes and some grain drying. Image
On a blackboard on the side of the building, I find a tally of the 2023 Ramadan contributions for zakat, just like in Meiba. It's a much smaller congregation here though.

There's also a signup sheet for who will lead to break the fast each week (I think?) (请开斋名单) Image
The prayer room is on the second floor. A small sign outside indicates the salah times for the 5 daily prayers.

The interior decoration is old and perhaps a bit worn, but very clean and dust-free. No one else is around. ImageImageImage
I go back outside to eat and find the ladies preparing their own lunch.

"Hey" I say, "Isn't it Ramadan? Can you eat now?"
"Oh, we're not Hui" she says. "We just work here. We don't fast".

"Oh...Is the owner Hui?"
"Yeah"

"Where is he?
"He's busy. He has a lot of businesses."
On my 30+ km highway drive back to my original destination, I reflected on the two mosques.

I really regretted in both cases that I didn't get to speak directly to any Hui people in those communities to find our how they feel.

But anyway, here's how I sum up my thoughts now:
1. The Chinese rationale for the removal of domes and minarets of mosques in China has been public for a few years now; the stated objective of making the visual of the mosques conform to Chinese (and not foreign) architectural styles is clearly met by these renovations.
It's been noted that mosques with more Sinitic or styling seem less likely to be affected. For example, here's the Dujiangyan city mosque, constructed in 1934, with its green tiered pagodas, crescent moon and star, unchanged. My photo + file photo from chinaislam.net.cn ImageImage
2. At least in the two sites I visited, I couldn't see any evidence that the usage of the mosque had been impacted (or that anything besides the outward appearance had been changed).

They are clearly still places of prayer, congregation, and community for practicing Hui.
I note while researching for this thread that the necessity of domes and minarets for a mosque to be a mosque is a hotly-contested topic in the rest of the Islamic world.

This is also how I found out minarets are banned in Switzerland.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swis… Image
3. From a PERSONAL TASTE perspective, I think the Meiba renovation looks poorly proportioned and kinda ugly.

The Weizhou renovation doesn't look bad, but also you can't even tell it's a mosque anymore.

IMO, the Dujiangyan mosque's fusion aesthetic is a good blend of styles: Image
4. I don't fool myself thinking that I discovered anything with my little field trip that will change anyone's mind.

Those that think it's a Bad Thing will keep thinking it, and those that think it's Totally Fine will do the same. They'll both see confirmation here I'd expect.
5. You shouldn't care what I think. I'm not a Hui Muslim in China, this doesn't impact me, (I'm an atheist) and I'm not interested in speaking for them when I don't know how they feel.

I have guesses, but without having interviewed any Hui people, my guesses are worth a fart.
6. But as you try to figure out how you feel, I encourage you to look critically at people who aren't Hui Muslims in China, but whom for whatever reason ARE in the business of speaking for them, trying to tell you how you should feel.

Lord knows we have an abundance of them.
That's all for this thread. Thanks for reading to the end. Hope it was...something. Informative? Mildly interesting?

P.S. It's a sensitive topic, and I appreciate people have strong opinions, but if I see you behaving like a turd in my mentions, I'll just block ya.

- End

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More from @pretentiouswhat

Oct 15
I've just wrapped a 10 days on the North Yunnan loop route, hitting Dali, Lijiang, Diqing/Shangri-la, and Nujiang. Some of the most beautiful places I've seen in China.

Lots of essay content from the trip coming soon, but here's a summary of the route first, 1 tweet per city.🧵 Image
...oh, and I'm writing this partly as a travel report/guide for others who might like to do a similar tour in the future, and partly as a foundation for the essay content that's coming next.

So I'll try to provide both travel details and some background info for each spot... Image
Dali: Dali was the only city on this trip that I'd visited before. It was the last stop on my loop tour but it could have been the first too, as it has many flights from everywhere and high-speed rail from Kunming.

Dali City has just 660k people (versus the greater Dali Prefecture with 3.2m). Like most Chinese cities of its size, it has both a busy, loud, crowded old city section, but also a clean, tidy, comfortable modern city section. The modern city has skyscrapers, shopping malls, a university, some manufacturing industry, AND a flourishing tourism sector based around Erhai Lake with its great views of Cangshan and Jizushan (mountains). It also boasts several train stations, an airport, and good highway connectivity.

Dali is a T4 city in Yicai's city rankings, coming in at #179, which is actually very close to the median (169). If it werent for the lake and the tourism, it would be just another moderately-developed medium-sized city. But it has that lake...

I feel like I'm supposed to be a snob and say I don't like Dali because it's too touristy, but I actually think it's still a good vibe, especially in the evenings when the tourists go back to their hotels and stop clogging up the roads with their rented convertibles. It IS very commercialized, and I don't recommend staying near the ancient city or even on that side of Erhai Lake (the west side), but I'd still love to own a vacation home here someday, halfway up one of the mountains with a view of the lake and the rolling hills.Image
Image
Read 10 tweets
Sep 26
I've already seen many helpful summaries of Xi's announcements at the UN Climate Summit regarding China's new emissions goals, so I won't repeat them here. Go read them!

I will focus my analysis on the power item specifically; namely: 3600 GW of wind and solar by 2035. 🧵
This was described as a 6x escalation over the 2020 numbers. This is basically correct.

China had roughly 535 GW of wind and solar at the end of 2020 so 6x would be 3210. So actually, 3600 GW is 6.7x the 2020 numbers.

China today has roughly 1600 GW of wind and solar.
To get from 1600 to 3600 over 10 years implies average capacity growth of 200 GW per year.

At first blush, this indeed seems very conservative. After all, China added 360 GW of wind and solar in 2024 and should be somewhere in that neighborhood (maybe slightly less) this year.
Read 13 tweets
Sep 22
A fun thing about Chinese rivers I learned from my research last week:

This map shows the ancient courses of the Yellow River (in blue) and the now-disappeared Ji River (in red). The upper blue line the Yellow route during the Western Han. The lower is its modern path. 🧵 Image
Actually, the Western Han route of the Yellow is one of the MANY known routes it has taken over the last 2000 years, as you can see from this image.

From 1128-1855, the Yellow spent 700+ years flowing in an entirely different direction - southeast. During that period, it merged with the Huai River near modern-day Huai'an in Jiangsu, and then traveled northeast again to dump into the ocean. The silt deposits around its estuary pushed the coastline out dozens of kilometers over those 700 years.Image
That lake system you can see at the bottom of the map above didn't exist at the time. That's Hongze Lake 洪泽湖 (literally: "flood marsh lake") which formed because after the Yellow River's course changed in 1855, the Huai River, lacking the volume of water the Yellow had previously provided, silted up itself, lost its exit to the ocean, formed Hongze Lake, and ended up finding a new outlet connecting south to the Yangtze near Yangzhou, turning the Huai River into a Yangtze tributary, rather then a Yellow tributary.

The Huai only regained its outlet to the ocean in the 1950s when the PRC built the North Jiangsu Main Irrigation Canal.Image
Read 13 tweets
Sep 20
Involution 内卷 or 卷 doesn't have to be a hard word, but I keep seeing it misused in China commentary, e.g. this article, which I also have mixed feedback on.

Simply: Involution is the state of intense competition AND the symptoms of that competition.🧵
csis.org/blogs/trustee-…
Quick history lesson:

内卷 (nei juan) is the original word for involution used today to describe a state of intense and fruitless competition. It literally translates as "inward coiling" and was borrowed from the anthropology field.

It began to see its new use in China around 2019-2020, initially as a noun. Students and young people feeling exhausted by intense competition in school, for jobs, and society in general described those environments as having 内卷.
The key point is the competition. So in 2020 you'd see usages like "job market involution" (职场内卷)" society involution" (社会内卷).

But the full word is less common these days vs. the slangier word for involution, which sees the "内” portion dropped in favor of just "卷". Image
Read 13 tweets
Sep 9
China's National Computing+Energy Strategy:

This is the layout for China's national computing strategy. Under the "East Data, West-Computer" 东数西算 slogan, high-priority tasks are handled by local clusters, while lower-priority tasks are outsourced to the energy-rich west.🧵 Image
According to China's renewable consumption quota policy, all new data centers in these hub regions must buy at least 80% of their power from renewable sources.

This should be no problem for the blue hubs, located in renewables-rich regions. Might be trickier for red hubs.
Local municipalities might have their own, even more stringent requirements. Ningxia, for instance, requires new data centers be 100% green.

Good news for wind and solar developers, looking for a new offtake channel now that the FiTs are gone. No relief for coal power.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 5
Oh no...🤦‍♂️

This op-ed on Chinese cleantech overcapacity and competition was in The Wire China a few days ago. Unfortunately it contains many huge errors about Chinese cleantech sectors I can't ignore.

Paywalled. I'll provide screenshots and comment. 🧵
thewirechina.com/2025/08/31/bei…
[Oh, and this will be another long thread. It probably should have been a long-form essay instead, but I already wrote more than half of it before I realized how long it had gotten. Sorry in advance.]

This piece has problems immediately in the second paragraph, starting with:

"China's domestic demand for green tech has also peaked given the massive frontloading of installed capacity during the last few years, fueled by subsidies."

This has two big errors:

1. Chinese demand for green tech has not peaked, as evidenced by the steadily rising annual installed capacity figures for wind and solar. In fact, the installed capacity isn't just rising each year, but even the volume of new installs in a single year has grown every year from 2020-2024. Last year saw 277 GW of solar PV and 80 GW of wind.

Even now in 2025, with the offtake policy reforms starting from 1 June, it looks like solar is going to at least match the capacity growth from last year, while wind is actually going to EXCEED the capacity figures from last year. Domestic demand is strong. As for next year, we'll see what the market reforms bring.

2. Chinese newbuild solar and wind farms have not been subsidised for several years already now (since 2021). Over the past few years (until 1 June 2025) they were built on a feed-in-tariff (FiT) basis, which means they earn a fixed on-grid price from the gridco, independent of what's happening in power markets.

If market prices are high, the FiT may be less than the market rate. If market prices are low, the FiT may be more than the market rate. In a power market context, this is very different from a subsidy (although it could be construed as/look like a subsidy if market prices end up lower than the FiT rate for long periods).Image
Same second paragraph, continued:

"plummeting external and domestic demand have forced Chinese tech companies to compete aggressively to gain market share by cutting prices"

This is wrong on both the domestic and international counts. We already know from the last post domestic demand for wind and solar installs is still rising.

Meanwhile, in the international space, Chinese solar panel exports totaled 236 GW in 2024, rising 13% YoY. Wind turbine exports were 5.2 GW, rising 42% YoY.

In 2025 to date, completed *panel* exports have fallen 5%, but cell and wafer exports are rising dramatically, up 73% and 26% YTD, respectively. Exports to some countries are down, but they have been more than offset by rising exports to other countries and regions. Unfortunately, I don't have a source on YTD wind turbine exports for 2025 so can't comment there.

The point I'm trying to make here is that while there's oversupply relative to demand, it's not reasonable to attribute much - if any - of this supply-demand mismatch to the demand side. Demand is fine. The primary driver of the supply-demand mismatch is coming from the supply side.
Read 15 tweets

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