Popular Chinese Muslim website down after posting

letter critical of President Xi Jinping

A popular website for Chinese Muslims has been inaccessible since
Saturday (Dec 10) after a critical letter addressed to Chinese President Xi
Jinping was posted in one of its forums.
PUBLISHEDDEC 14, 2016, 7:10 PM SGT

A popular website for Chinese Muslims has been inaccessible since Saturday
(Dec 10) after a critical letter addressed to Chinese President Xi Jinping was
posted in one of its forums.

Users of China Muslim Net, one of China's main websites carrying material by
and about the Hui, a large and relatively well-assimilated community of
China's Muslims, say they have been unable to access the website since
Saturday.

A critical open letter addressed to Xi had been uploaded in a discussion forum

on the site hours before it became inaccessible.

Young, internet-savvy Hui consider the website to be an important forum for

discussing matters relating to their religious practice.

Chinese officials recently said that religious extremism had begun to spread to
central China from the violence-prone far western region of Xinjiang, mostly
populated by ethnic Uighurs, who make up another large portion of China's
Muslims.

China's constitution guarantees religious freedom, but rights groups say the
officially atheist ruling Communist Party seeks to restrict religious practice,
especially for Muslims. The Chinese government strongly denies such charges.

The reason for the website's inaccessibility was not clear.

The Internet address for China Muslim Net on Wednesday (Dec 14) showed a
message saying the website was under maintenance.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the government's internet regulator,

did not reply to requests for comment on Wednesday. Messages and calls to
the website's chief executive went unanswered.

A copy of the critical letter posted on the site, and seen by Reuters, called for
the release of a student named Kwong Pyong who the letter said has been
unreachable since October, shortly after he shared photos online of a satirical
T-shirt with a message likening President Xi to Hitler.

The student said he planned to wear the shirt in public.

Shortly after the letter was posted, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, Xi Wuyi, shared a screenshot of it along with other China Muslim
Net content on her Weibo account, saying that the website promoted religious
extremism.

Previous Weibo posts by the same scholar have lambasted the website for its
critical stance on atheism.

President Xi in July urged Chinese Muslims to resist illegal religious

"infiltration".

Gu Yi, one of the letter's three co-authors and a student activist studying in
the United States, said he suspected the loss of access to China Muslim Net
was related to the letter.

"Why would they target the website at this time?" he told Reuters on
Wednesday. "Wuyi's screenshots of the post of the open letter gained almost
500 reposts in several hours, making