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From Mongolia live:

It was not the Taliban who exploded the stone carvings, but the Chinese Communist Party A 57.9-meter-tall cliff stone-carved vertical Guanyin statue in Pingshan County, Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, which spent nearly five years and cost about 17 million yuan, was blown up by the Chinese government officials on February 2 2019.

Some commenters are casting doubt on the claim (spelling and grammar as-is):

why would they do it and better yet do you have evidence to substantiate such an accusation?

U have no evidence, and the Mongolia live is anti-china place, here, I will stand for China

Doing a search for sources didn't come up with many mainstream sources. Searching Google News gave hits for sources like Bitter Winter (example), and googling "Hebei statue destroyed" gave matches to sources like Taiwan News and The Epoch Times.

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    Your Taiwan News link suggests that the statue had been built 2 years earlier, drawing over 10,000 visitors per day, and was destroyed as part of a crackdown on the commercialization of Buddhism. Apparently a large new statue of Chairman Mao was destroyed 4 years ago by the authorities, so the Chinese government may have an issue with the building of large statues as much as with religion. Ultimately I suspect it is a question of control.
    – Henry
    Commented Oct 8, 2020 at 13:42
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    The mentioning of the taliban tries to imply that some cultural heritage was destroyed here. But this statue was build very recently so I don't see how this destruction would be very different from say razing an unused shopping center.
    – quarague
    Commented Oct 9, 2020 at 14:53
  • Maybe the news didn't get mainstream coverage not because it's untrue (as the commenters suggested), but because destroying something so recently built is perceived as not very newsworthy. (China's treatment of the media (example incident) may also be an influence)
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Oct 9, 2020 at 21:25
  • @quarague in fairness it does mention the price and time taken to build it, which wouldn't be the case with heritage from a long time ago.
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Oct 9, 2020 at 21:29
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    If you scan the Bitter Winter site you can see that this happens regularly, almost daily in China so I agree that this is not particularly newsworthy.
    – Avery
    Commented Oct 14, 2020 at 11:41

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