China’s Crackdown on Muslims of Hainan Island: The Utsuls Were Once Celebrated by the Chinese Government for Their Links to the Larger Muslim World
Amy
Qin
By
Keith Bradsher and Amy Qin
15 Feb 2021
The call to
prayer still echoes through the alleys of Sanya’s nearly 1,000-year-old Muslim
neighbourhood, where crescent-topped minarets rise above the rooftops. The
government’s crackdown on the tiny, deeply pious community in this southern
Chinese city has been subtle.
A mosque in Sanya, a city on the southern Chinese island of
Hainan.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times
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Signs on
shops and homes that read “Allahu Akbar” — “God is greatest” in Arabic — have
been covered with foot-wide stickers promoting the “China Dream,” a
nationalistic official slogan. The Chinese characters for halal, meaning
permissible under Islam, have been removed from restaurant signs and menus.
Authorities have closed two Islamic schools and have twice tried to bar female
students from wearing headscarves.
The Utsuls,
a community of no more than 10,000 Muslims in Sanya, are among the latest to
emerge as targets of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against foreign
influence and religions. Their troubles show how Beijing is working to erode
the religious identity of even its smallest Muslim minorities, in a push for a
unified Chinese culture with the Han ethnic majority at its core.
The new
restrictions in Sanya, a city on the resort island of Hainan, mark a reversal
in government policy. Until several years ago, officials supported the Utsuls’
Islamic identity and their ties with Muslim countries, according to local
religious leaders and residents, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid
government retaliation.
The party
has said its restrictions on Islam and Muslim communities are aimed at curbing
violent religious extremism. It has used that rationale to justify a clampdown
on Muslims in China’s far western region of Xinjiang, following a series of
attacks seven years ago. But Sanya has seen little unrest.
The
tightening of control over the Utsuls “reveals the real face of the Chinese
Communist campaign against local communities,” said Ma Haiyun, an assistant
professor at Frostburg State University in Maryland who studies Islam in China.
“This is about trying to strengthen state control. It’s purely anti-Islam.”
Large mosques in Sanya, like this one photographed last fall, are filled
with Muslims from all over China during the winter, as families from cold
northern provinces flock to tropical Hainan.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New
York Times
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The Chinese
government has repeatedly denied that it opposes Islam. But under Xi Jinping,
its top leader, the party has torn down mosques, ancient shrines and Islamic
domes and minarets in northwestern and central China. Its crackdown has focused
heavily on the Uighurs, a Central Asian Muslim minority of 11 million in
Xinjiang, many of whom have been held in mass detention camps and forced to
renounce Islam.
The effort
to “sinicise Islam” accelerated in 2018 after the State Council, China’s
cabinet, issued a confidential directive ordering officials to prevent the
faith from interfering with secular life and the state’s functions. The
directive warned against “Arabisation” and the influence of Saudi Arabia, or
“Saudi-isation,” in mosques and schools.
In Sanya,
the party is going after a group with a significant position in China’s
relations with the Islamic world. The Utsuls have played host to Muslims from
around the country seeking the balmy climes of Hainan province, and they have
served as a bridge to Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The Utsuls’
Islamic identity was celebrated for years by the government as China pushed for
stronger links with the Arab world. Such links have been key to Xi’s Belt and
Road Initiative, a program to finance infrastructure projects across the world
and increase Beijing’s political sway in the process.
The Utsuls
have become “an important base for Muslims who have moved abroad to find their
roots and investigate their ancestors,” said a government notice in 2017
hailing the role of Islam in Hainan in the Belt and Road plan. “To date, they
have received thousands of scholars and friends from more than a dozen countries
and regions, and are an important window for cultural exchanges among peoples
around the South China Sea.”
Utsul Muslims in Sanya
built this nine-story Islamic high school several years ago, as an alternative
to government-run schools, but the local authorities closed it.Credit...Keith
Bradsher/The New York Times
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Despite
being officially labelled part of China’s largest ethnic minority, the Hui, the
Utsuls see themselves as culturally distinct from other Muslim communities in
the country.
They are
Sunni Muslims, believed to be descended from the Cham, the long-distance
fishermen and maritime traders of the Champa Kingdom, which ruled for centuries
along Vietnam’s central and southern coasts. Starting as early as the 10th
century, Cham refugees fled war in what is now central Vietnam and travelled to
Hainan, a tropical island the size of Maryland.
Over the
centuries, the Utsuls maintained strong links with Southeast Asia and continued
to practice Islam largely unfettered. But during the Cultural Revolution of the
late 1960s and early 1970s, roving bands of Red Guards devoted to Mao Zedong
destroyed mosques in Utsul villages, as they did across China.
As China
opened to the world in the early 1980s, the Utsuls began reviving their Islamic
traditions. Many families reconnected with long-lost relatives in Malaysia and
Indonesia, including a Malaysian former prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi,
whose maternal grandfather was an Utsul who grew up in Sanya.
To this
day, many Utsuls, also known as the Utsats, speak a distinct Chamic language
similar to that still used in parts of Vietnam and Cambodia, in addition to
Chinese. A sour tamarind fish stew infused with Southeast Asian flavours
remains the local specialty, and elders pass on stories of their ancestors’
migration to Hainan. Women wear colorful headscarves, sometimes beaded or
embroidered, that cover their hair, ears and neck, a style similar to head
coverings worn by Muslim women in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Yusuf Liu,
a Malaysian-Chinese writer who has studied the Utsuls, said that the group had
been able to preserve a distinct identity because they were geographically
isolated for centuries and held firm to their religious beliefs. He noted that
the Utsuls were similar in many ways to the Malays.
“They share
many of the same characteristics, including language, dress, history, blood
ties and food,” Liu said.
As Sanya’s
tourism economy boomed over the past two decades, the Utsuls’ ties with the
Middle East also grew. Young men travelled to Saudi Arabia for Islamic studies.
Community leaders set up schools for children and adults to study Arabic. They
started building domes and minarets for their mosques, shifting away from the
traditional Chinese architectural style.
For centuries, the
Utsuls have lived several hundred yards inland from this beach, which Hainan’s
tourism boom has made one of the most famous in China.Credit...Keith
Bradsher/The New York Times
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Although
there were some clashes between Utsuls and neighbouring Han in decades past,
they have mostly lived in peace, with both groups benefiting from the recent
surge in tourism. In contrast, Beijing has long tried to suppress Uighur
resistance to Chinese rule, which has sometimes been violent. The party has
said that its policies in Xinjiang have curbed what it describes as terrorism
and religious extremism.
But in the
past two years, even in Sanya, authorities have pushed to limit overt
expressions of faith and links to the Arab world.
Local
mosque leaders said they were told to remove loudspeakers that broadcast the
call to prayer from the tops of minarets and place them on the ground — and,
more recently, to turn down the volume as well. Construction of a new mosque
was halted in a dispute over its imposing dimensions and supposedly “Arab”
architectural elements. Its concrete skeleton now gathers dust. The city has
barred children under 18 from studying Arabic, residents said.
Utsul
residents said they wanted to learn Arabic not only to better understand
Islamic texts, but also to communicate with Arab tourists who, before the
pandemic, came to their restaurants, hotels and mosques. Some residents
expressed frustration with the new restrictions, saying they called into
question China’s promise to respect its 56 officially recognised ethnic groups.
A local
religious leader who studied for five years in Saudi Arabia said the community
had been told that they were no longer allowed to build domes.
The local authorities have blocked the completion of this mosque in
Sanya for the past two years, contending that it is much larger than its neighbourhood
requires. Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times
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“The
mosques in the Middle East are like this. We want to build ours like that so
they look like mosques and not just like houses,” he said, speaking on
condition of anonymity because some residents had recently been briefly
detained for criticising the government. (In a sign of the sensitivity of the
issue, a half-dozen plainclothes police officers questioned us in Sanya about our
reporting at mosques.)
The
community has sometimes resisted. In September, Utsul parents and students
protested outside schools and government offices after several public schools
forbade girls to wear headscarves to class. Weeks later, authorities reversed
the order, a rare bow to public pressure.
Still, the
government sees the assimilation of China’s various ethnic minorities as key to
building a stronger nation.
“We need to
use ethnic differences as a foundation on which to build a unified Chinese
consciousness,” said Xiong Kunxin, a professor of ethnic studies at Minzu
University in Beijing. “This is the direction of China’s future development.”
For now,
the Utsuls are in an uneasy coexistence with authorities.
At the
centre of the Nankai Mosque’s courtyard, a red Chinese flag flies at nearly the
same height as the tops of the minarets.
The Nankai Mosque in Sanya, rebuilt in the 1990s with Saudi-influenced
minarets. As Utsuls became more prosperous in recent years, more of them
traveled to Saudi Arabia for pilgrimages or for study.Credit...Keith
Bradsher/The New York Times
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Keith
Bradsher reported from Sanya, and Amy Qin from Taipei, Taiwan. Amy Chang Chien
contributed reporting from Taipei.
Keith
Bradsher is the Shanghai bureau chief. He previously served as Hong Kong bureau
chief, Detroit bureau chief, Washington correspondent covering international
trade and then the U.S. economy, telecommunications reporter in New York and
airlines reporter.
Amy Qin
is an international correspondent for The New York Times covering the
intersection of culture, politics and society in China.
Original
Headline: China’s Crackdown on Muslims
Extends to a Resort Island
Source: The New York Times
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/china’s-crackdown-muslims-hainan-island/d/124334