SANYA, China – The call to prayer still echoes through the alleys of Sanya’s nearly 1,000-year-old Muslim quarter, with minarets with crescent moons rising over the roofs. The government’s crackdown on the tiny, deeply devout community in this southern Chinese city has been subtle.
Signs on shops and houses that read “Allahu akbar” – “God is the greatest” in Arabic – have been fitted with stickers an inch wide to advertise the “China Dream,” a nationalist official slogan. The Chinese characters for Halal, which means permissible in Islam, have been removed from restaurant signs and menus. The authorities have closed two Islamic schools and tried twice to exclude female students from wearing headscarves.
The Utsuls, a community of no more than 10,000 Muslims in Sanya, are among the recent targets of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against foreign influences and religions. Their problems show how Beijing is working to undermine the religious identity of even its smallest Muslim minorities in order to achieve a unified Chinese culture, the core of which is the Han ethnic majority.
The new restrictions in Sanya, a town on the holiday island of Hainan, mark a reversal of government policy. Until a few years ago, officials supported the Utsuls’ Islamic identity and ties to Muslim countries, according to local religious leaders and residents, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid government retaliation.
The party has stated that its restrictions on Islam and the Muslim communities are designed to curb violent religious extremism. She has used this rationale to justify cracking down on Muslims in China’s westernmost region, Xinjiang, after a series of attacks seven years ago. But Sanya saw little unrest.
The tightening of control over the Utsuls “reveals the real face of China’s communist campaign against local communities,” said Ma Haiyun, an associate professor at Frostburg State University in Maryland who studies Islam in China. “The point here is to strengthen state control. It is purely against Islam. “
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied that it is against Islam. But under Xi Jinping, its supreme leader, the party has demolished mosques, old shrines, and Islamic domes and minarets in northwestern and central China. The crackdown focused heavily on the Uighurs, a Central Asian Muslim minority of 11 million in Xinjiang, many of whom were held in mass detention camps and forced to renounce Islam.
Efforts to “sinize” Islam accelerated in 2018 after the State Council, China’s cabinet, issued a confidential policy instructing officials to prevent the belief from interfering with the secular life and functions of the state. The directive warned of “Arabization” and the influence of Saudi Arabia or “Saudiization” in mosques and schools.
In Sanya, the party is persecuting a group with a significant position in China’s relations with the Islamic world. The Utsuls have hosted Muslims from across the country seeking the mild climes of Hainan Province, and they served as a bridge to Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The Islamic identity of the Utsuls has been celebrated by the government for years as China pushed for stronger ties with the Arab world. Such connections were key to Mr. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, a program to fund infrastructure projects around the world and strengthen Beijing’s political influence.
The Utsuls have become “an important base for Muslims who have moved abroad to find their roots and investigate their ancestors,” according to a 2017 government release that highlighted the role of Islam in Hainan in the belt- and street map was highlighted. “To date, they have welcomed thousands of scholars and friends from more than a dozen countries and regions and are an important window for cultural exchanges between people around the South China Sea.”
Although the Utsuls have been officially classified as part of China’s largest ethnic minority, the Hui, they see themselves as culturally different from other Muslim communities in the country.
These are Sunni Muslims believed to be descended from Cham, the long-distance fishermen and sea traders of the Champa kingdom that ruled the central and southern coast of Vietnam for centuries. As early as the 10th century, Cham refugees fled the war in what is now central Vietnam and traveled to Hainan, a tropical island the size of Maryland.
Over the centuries, the Utsuls maintained close ties with Southeast Asia and practiced Islam largely without restriction. But during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, wandering Red Guard groups devoted to Mao Zedong destroyed mosques in Utsul villages as they did across China.
When China opened to the world in the early 1980s, the Utsuls began to revive their Islamic traditions. Many families have reconnected with long-lost relatives in Malaysia and Indonesia, including a former Malaysian Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, whose maternal grandfather was a Utsul who grew up in Sanya.
To this day, many Utsuls, also known as Utsats, speak a particular Chamic language similar to the language used in parts of Vietnam and Cambodia, in addition to Chinese. A sour tamarind fish stew with Southeast Asian flavors remains the local specialty, and the elders pass on stories of their ancestors’ migration to Hainan. Women wear colored headscarves, sometimes beaded or embroidered, that cover their hair, ears and neck. This type is similar to headgear worn by Muslim women in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Yusuf Liu, a Malaysian-Chinese writer who has studied the Utsuls, said the group was able to maintain a distinct identity because they were geographically isolated and clinging to their religious beliefs for centuries. He noted that the Utsuls were similar to the Malaysians in many ways.
“They share many of the same qualities, including language, clothing, history, blood ties, and food,” said Mr. Liu.
As Sanya’s tourism economy boomed over the past two decades, so did the Utsuls’ relations with the Middle East. Young men traveled to Saudi Arabia to study Islam. Community leaders built schools for children and adults to learn Arabic. They began building domes and minarets for their mosques and turned away from traditional Chinese architectural styles.
Although there have been some clashes between the Utsuls and neighboring Han in the past few decades, they have largely 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 violence, which has been violent at times. The party has said that its policies in Xinjiang have curbed what it calls terrorism and religious extremism.
But for the past two years, even in Sanya, authorities have been pressing to curtail overt beliefs and links with the Arab world.
Local mosque leaders said they should remove the speakers that broadcast the call to prayer from the minaret tops and place them on the floor – and, more recently, turn the volume down. The construction of a new mosque was halted after a dispute over its imposing dimensions and supposedly “Arab” architectural elements. The concrete skeleton is now collecting dust. The city has banned children under the age of 18 from studying Arabic.
Utsul residents said they wanted to learn Arabic not only to better understand Islamic texts but also to communicate with Arab tourists who came to their restaurants, hotels and mosques before the pandemic. Some residents expressed frustration at the new restrictions and questioned China’s promise to respect its 56 officially recognized ethnic groups.
A local religious leader who studied in Saudi Arabia for five years said the community had been told they were no longer allowed to build domes.
“The mosques in the Middle East are like that. We want to build ours so that they look like mosques and not just like houses, ”he said on condition of anonymity because some residents had recently been briefly arrested for criticizing the government. (As a sign of the sensitivity of the problem, half a dozen plainclothes police in Sanya questioned us about our reporting in mosques.)
The church has resisted at times. In September, Utsul parents and students protested outside schools and government offices after several public schools banned girls from wearing 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 the key to building a stronger nation.
“We need to use ethnic differences as a foundation to build a unified Chinese consciousness,” said Xiong Kunxin, professor of ethnic studies at Minzu University in Beijing. “This is the direction for China’s future development.”
The Utsuls are currently in an uncomfortable coexistence with the authorities.
In the center of the courtyard of the Nankai Mosque, a red Chinese flag flies at almost the same height as the tops of the minarets.
Keith Bradsher reported from Sanya and Amy Qin from Taipei, Taiwan. Amy Chang Chien contributed to coverage from Taipei.
