China's crackdown on Muslims extends to Sanya, a city on resort island Hainan

The new restrictions in Sanya, a city on the resort island of Hainan, mark a reversal in government policy. PHOTO: REUTERS

SANYA (NYTIMES) - 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.

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."

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied that it opposes Islam. But under President 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 Mr 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."

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.

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.

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.

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