SANYA, China – The call to prayer is still echoed through the alleys of Sanya’s nearly 1,000-year-old Muslim neighborhood, where minarets with crescent-shaped peaks tower over the rooftops. The government crackdown on the small, very devout community in this South China city has been subtle.
Signs on shops and houses that read ‘Allahu akbar’ – ‘God is greatest’ in Arabic – are covered with foot-wide stickers promoting the ‘China Dream’, a nationalist 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 twice tried to stop female 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 influences and religions. Their problems show how Beijing is working to erode the religious identity of even the smallest Muslim minorities, in a pursuit of a unified Chinese culture with the Han ethnic majority at its core.
The new restrictions in Sanya, a town on the holiday island of Hainan, mark a turnaround in government policy. Until a few years ago, officials 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 retaliation from the government.
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 oppression of Muslims in China’s westernmost region, Xinjiang, after 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 strengthening state control. It is purely anti-Islam. “
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied opposition to Islam. But under Xi Jinping, its supreme leader, the party has demolished mosques, ancient shrines, and Islamic domes and minarets in northwestern and central China. The crackdown strongly targeted the Uyghurs, an 11 million Central Asian Muslim minority in Xinjiang, many of whom have been held in mass detention camps and forced to renounce Islam.
The attempt to “ sin ” Islam was accelerated in 2018 after the State Council, the Chinese cabinet, issued a confidential directive ordering officials to prevent the faith from disrupting secular life and state functions. The directive warned of “Arabization” and the influence of Saudi Arabia, or “Saudi -isation”, in mosques and schools.
In Sanya, the party goes after a group with an important position in China’s relations with the Islamic world. The Utsuls have hosted Muslims from all over the country seeking the balmy climates of Hainan Province, and they have served as a bridge to Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The Islamic identity of the Utsuls was celebrated by the government for years as China pushed for stronger ties to the Arab world. Such ties were key to Mr Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, a program to fund infrastructure projects around the world and increase Beijing’s political influence in the process.
The Utsuls have “become an important base for Muslims who have moved abroad to find their roots and research their ancestors,” said a 2017 government report praising the role of Islam in Hainan in the Belt and Road plan. . “To date, they have hosted 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.”
Despite being officially labeled as part of China’s largest ethnic minority, the Hui, the Utsuls see themselves as being culturally distinct from other Muslim communities in the country.
They are Sunni Muslims, believed to be descended from the Cham, the long-range fishermen and maritime traders of the Champa Kingdom, which ruled the central and southern coasts of Vietnam for centuries. Starting in 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 largely untethered. But during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, roving Red Guard gangs devoted to Mao Zedong destroyed mosques in Utsul villages, as they do all over China.
When China opened up to the world in the early 1980s, the Utsuls began to revive 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 a Utsul who grew up in Sanya.
To this day, many Utsuls, also known as the Utsats, speak another Chamic language similar to the language still used in parts of Vietnam and Cambodia, in addition to Chinese. A sour tamarind fish stew infused with Southeast Asian flavors remains the local specialty, and elders tell 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 the head covering worn by Muslim women in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Yusuf Liu, a Malaysian-Chinese writer who has studied the Utsuls, said the group had been able to maintain a clear identity because for centuries they were geographically isolated and adhered to their religious beliefs. He noted that the Utsuls were in many ways similar to the Malays.
“They share many of the same characteristics, including language, clothing, history, blood ties and food,” said Mr. Liu.
As Sanya’s tourism economy boomed over the past twenty years, the Utsuls’ relationship with the Middle East has also grown. Young men traveled to Saudi Arabia for Islamic studies. Community leaders have established schools for children and adults to study Arabic. They started by building domes and minarets for their mosques, moving away from the traditional Chinese architectural style.
While there have been some clashes between Utsuls and neighboring Han in recent decades, they have mostly lived in peace, with both groups benefiting from the recent surge in tourism. Beijing, on the other hand, has long sought to suppress Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule, which has at times been violent. The party has said its policies in Xinjiang have curbed what it describes as terrorism and religious extremism.
But in the past two years, authorities have pushed even in Sanya to limit open expressions of faith and ties to the Arab world.
Local mosque leaders said they were told to remove speakers emitting the call to prayer from the tops of minarets and place them on the ground – and more recently to turn down the volume. Construction of a new mosque was halted in a dispute over its imposing dimensions and so-called ‘Arabian’ architectural elements; its concrete skeleton is now collecting dust. According to residents, children under 18 are not allowed to study Arabic.
Residents of Utsul 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. Frustrated by the new restrictions, some residents said they 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 could no longer build domes.
“The mosques in the Middle East are like that. We want to build ours to look like mosques and not just houses, ”he said, on condition of anonymity, as some residents have recently been briefly detained for criticizing the government. (As a sign of the sensitivity of the issue, half a dozen plainclothes police officers questioned us in Sanya about our reporting to 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 in class. Weeks later, authorities returned the order, a rare bow to public pressure.
Yet 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 the 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 live in uneasy coexistence with the authorities.
In the center of the Nankai Mosque courtyard, a red Chinese flag flies 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 from Taipei.