SANYA, China – The call to prayer still echoes through the alleys of Sanya, the nearly 1,000-year-old Muslim neighborhood, where crescent-shaped minarets rise above the rooftops. The government’s repression of the small, deeply pious community in this city in southern China was subtle.
Signs on shops and houses that read “Allahu akbar” – “God is the greatest” in Arabic are covered with footprints promoting the “China Dream”, a nationalist slogan. The Chinese characters for halal, which is permissible according to Islam, have been removed from restaurant plates and menus. Authorities have closed two Islamic schools and twice tried to prevent female students from wearing headscarves.
The Utsuls, a community of no more than 10,000 Muslims in Sanya, are one of the latest to emerge as targets for the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against foreign influence and religions. Their problems show how Beijing is defending the religious identity of even its smallest Muslim minorities, in a push for a united Chinese culture with the Han ethnic majority at its core.
The new restrictions in Sanya, a city on the refuge Hainan, point to a reversal in government policy. According to local religious leaders and residents, until a few years ago, officials supported the Islamic identity of Utsuls and their ties with Muslim countries, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from the government.
The party said the restrictions on Islam and Muslim communities were aimed at curbing violent religious extremism. It uses the rationale to justify fighting Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang, following a series of attacks seven years ago. But Sanya saw little unrest.
The tightening of 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’s about trying to strengthen state control. This is pure 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 northwestern and central China. Its repression focused strongly on the Uighurs, an 11-million-cent Central Asian Muslim minority in Xinjiang, many of whom were detained in mass detention camps and forced to renounce Islam.
The attempt to ‘cynicize Islam’ accelerated in 2018 after the State Council, the cabinet of China, issued a confidential mandate ordering officials to prevent the religion from interfering with secular life and the state’s functions. The directive warned against ‘Arabization’ and the influence of Saudi Arabia, or ‘Saudi Isization’, in mosques and schools.
In Sanya, the party is following a group that has an important position in China’s relations with the Islamic world. The Utsuls played host to Muslims from across the country seeking the mild climate of Hainan Province, and they served as a bridge to Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The Utsuls’ Islamic identity has been celebrated by the government for years while China has insisted on stronger ties with the Arab world. Such links were the key to Mr. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, a program to fund infrastructure projects around the world and increase Beijing’s political swing in the process.
The Utsuls “have become an important base for Muslims who have moved abroad to find their roots and investigate their ancestors,” a 2017 government statement said that the role of Islam in Hainan in the Belt and Road plan testifies. “To date, they have received thousands of scholars and friends from more than a dozen countries and regions, and it is an important window for cultural exchange between people around the South China Sea.”
Despite being officially designated as the largest ethnic minority in China, the Hui, the Utsuls consider themselves culturally of other Muslim communities in the country.
They are Sunni Muslims, presumably from the Cham, the long-distance fishermen and maritime traders of the Champa kingdom, who ruled for centuries along the central and southern coasts of Vietnam. From the tenth century, Cham refugees fled war in what is now central Vietnam, traveling to Hainan, a tropical island as large as Maryland.
Throughout the centuries, the Utsuls maintained strong ties with Southeast Asia and still practiced Islam largely unbound. But during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Red Guards’ circus band dedicated to Mao Zedong destroyed mosques in Utsul villages, just like in China.
When China opened up to the world in the early 1980s, the Utsuls began to revive their Islamic traditions. Many families have had contact again 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 the Utsats, speak a clear Chamic language similar to that still used in parts of Vietnam and Cambodia, in addition to Chinese. The local specialty is a sour tamarind fish stew served with Southeast Asian flavors, and elders convey stories of their ancestors’ migration to Hainan. Women wear colorful headscarves, sometimes beaded or embroidered, covering their hair, ears and neck, a style similar to headwear worn by Muslim women in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Yusuf Liu, a Malaysian-Chinese writer who studied the Utsuls, said the group was able to maintain a clear identity because they had been geographically isolated for centuries and held on to their religious beliefs. He noted that the Utsuls were in many ways similar to the Malays.
“They have many of the same characteristics, including language, clothing, history, blood ties and food,” he said. Liu said.
As Sanya’s tourism economy has boomed over the past two decades, the Utsuls’ ties with the Middle East have also increased. 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, away from the traditional Chinese architectural style.
Although there were clashes between Utsuls and neighboring Han decades ago, they mostly lived in peace, and both groups benefited from the recent increase in tourism. By contrast, Beijing has long sought to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule, which has at times been violent. The party said its policies in Xinjiang limited what it described as terrorism and religious extremism.
But for the past two years, even in Sanya, the authorities have insisted on restricting open religious expressions and ties with the Arab world.
Local mosque leaders have said they should remove speakers that broadcast the call to prayer from the top of the minarets and place them on the ground – and more recently also to reduce the volume. The construction of a new mosque was halted in a dispute over the imposing dimensions and the alleged “Arab” architectural elements; his concrete skeleton now collects dust. Residents said children under 18 could not study Arabic.
Residents of Utsul said they not only want to learn Arabic to better understand Islamic texts, but also want to communicate with Arab tourists who came to their restaurants, hotels and mosques before the pandemic. Some residents expressed frustration over the new restrictions, saying they doubted 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 not allowed to build more domes.
‘The mosques in the Middle East are like that. We want to build ours so that it looks like mosques and not just like houses, ‘he said, on condition of anonymity, because some residents have recently been detained for criticizing the government. (In a sign of the sensitivity of the matter, half a dozen ordinary police officers asked us in Sanya about our reporting at mosques.)
The community sometimes resisted. In September, parents and students of Utsul 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 trend toward public pressure.
Yet the government regards 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 to build a united 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 awkward coexistence with the authorities.
In the middle of the courtyard of the Nankai Mosque, a red Chinese flag flutters almost at the same height as the tops of the minarets.
Keith Bradsher reported from Sanya, and Amy Qin from Taipei, Taiwan. Amy Chang Chien reported from Taipei.