SANYA, China – The call to prayer still echoes through the alleys of the Muslim neighborhood of Sanya, almost 1,000 years old, where minarets with a crescent-shaped top rise above the rooftops. The government’s crackdown on the small, deeply pious community in this southern Chinese city was subtle.
Signs in stores and homes with the words “Allahu akbar” – “God is the greatest” in Arabic – were covered with stickers that promote the “Dream of China”, an official nationalist slogan. The Chinese characters for halal, which means allowed by Islam, have been removed from restaurant signs and menus. Authorities closed two Islamic schools and tried twice to prevent students from wearing headscarves.
The Utsuls, a community of no more than 10,000 Muslims in Sanya, are among the last to emerge as targets of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against foreign influence and religions. His problems show how Beijing is working to erode the religious identity of even its smallest Muslim minorities, in an effort to unify Chinese culture with the ethnic Han majority at its core.
The new restrictions in Sanya, a city on the tourist island of Hainan, mark a reversal in government policy. Until several years ago, authorities supported the Utsuls’ Islamic identity and their ties to Muslim countries, according to local religious leaders and residents, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid government retaliation.
The party said its restrictions on Islam and Muslim communities were aimed at containing violent religious extremism. He used this reasoning to justify a crackdown on Muslims in the Xinjiang region, in the far west of China, after a series of attacks seven years ago. But Sanya saw little excitement.
Increased control over the Utsuls “reveals the true 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. “It is about trying to strengthen control of the state. It is purely anti-Islam ”.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied that it opposes Islam. But under Xi Jinping, its main leader, the party demolished mosques, ancient shrines and Islamic domes and minarets in northwest and central China. His repression focused heavily on the Uighurs, a Muslim minority in Central Asia of 11 million people in Xinjiang, many of whom were held in mass detention camps and forced to renounce Islam.
The effort to “sinicize Islam” accelerated in 2018 after the State Council, China’s cabinet, issued a confidential directive ordering officials to prevent faith from interfering with secular life and state functions. The guideline warned against “arabization” and the influence of Saudi Arabia, or “Saudi-ization”, in mosques and schools.
In Sanya, the party goes after a group with a significant position in China’s relations with the Islamic world. Utsuls welcomed Muslims from across the country in search of the mild climate in Hainan province and served as a bridge for Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The Utsuls’ Islamic identity was celebrated for years by the government, while China pressed for stronger ties with the Arab world. These links have been essential to Mr. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, a program to finance infrastructure projects around the world and increase Beijing’s political dominance 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 warning in 2017 hailing Islam’s role in Hainan in the Belt and Road plan. “To date, they have welcomed thousands of academics 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.”
Despite being officially labeled as part of China’s largest ethnic minority, the Hui, the Utsuls consider themselves culturally distinct from other Muslim communities in the country.
They are Sunni Muslims, believed to be descendants of Cham, long-distance fishermen and sea traders from the Kingdom of Champa, who ruled for centuries along the central and southern coasts of Vietnam. 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 strong ties with Southeast Asia and continued to practice Islam without restrictions. But during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, itinerant bands of Red Guards devoted to Mao Zedong destroyed mosques in Utsul villages, as they did throughout China.
When China opened up 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 an Utsul who grew up in Sanya.
To this day, many Utsuls, also known as Utsats, speak a distinct chamic language, similar to that which is still used in parts of Vietnam and Cambodia, in addition to Chinese. Sour tamarind stew with Southeast Asian flavors remains the local specialty, and older people tell stories of their ancestors’ migration to Hainan. Women wear colorful headscarves, sometimes with beads or embroidery, which cover their hair, ears and neck, a style similar to what Muslim women wear in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Yusuf Liu, a Malaysian-Chinese writer who studied the Utsuls, said the group was able to preserve a distinct identity because it has been geographically isolated for centuries and has maintained its religious beliefs. He noted that the Utsuls were similar in many ways to Malaysians.
“They share many of the same characteristics, including language, dress, history, blood ties and food,” said Liu.
While Sanya’s tourism economy has thrived over the past two decades, Utsuls’ ties to the Middle East have also increased. The young men traveled 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, changing the traditional Chinese architectural style.
Although there have been some clashes between Utsuls and neighboring Han in recent decades, most of them have 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 is sometimes violent. The party said its policies in Xinjiang have reduced what it describes as terrorism and religious extremism.
But for the past two years, even in Sanya, the authorities have been pushing to limit open expressions of faith and links to the Arab world.
Local mosque leaders said they were instructed to remove the speakers that transmit the call to prayer from the top of the minarets and place them on the floor – and, more recently, to turn down the volume as well. The construction of a new mosque was interrupted in a dispute over its imposing dimensions and supposedly “Arab” architectural elements; your concrete skeleton now collects dust. The city has banned 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, went to their restaurants, hotels and mosques. Some residents expressed frustration at the new restrictions, saying they questioned China’s promise to respect its 56 officially recognized ethnic groups.
A local religious leader who studied for five years in Saudi Arabia said the community was informed that building domes was no longer allowed.
“Mosques in the Middle East are like that. We want to build ours like this, so that they look like mosques and not just houses, ”he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because some residents were recently arrested for criticizing the government. (In a sign of the sensitivity of the issue, half a dozen plainclothes policemen questioned us in Sanya about our reporting in mosques.)
The community has sometimes resisted. In September, Utsul parents and students protested outside schools and government offices after several public schools banned girls from wearing headscarves to go to class. Weeks later, the 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 basis for building a unified Chinese conscience,” said Xiong Kunxin, 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 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 top of the minarets.
Keith Bradsher reported from Sanya and Amy Qin from Taipei, Taiwan. Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting from Taipei.