A protest against the treatment of China's Uighurs outside the White House
Last week, when I returned to my parents’ apartment after a trip to the US, I noticed the door of the neighboring apartment, usually kept slightly open, was shut. The muffled chatter that normally drifted from behind the door had turned to silence. “The girls had to leave,” Dad explained. “The families upstairs and downstairs wrote a joint letter to complain about them.”
Half a year ago, three dozen young women moved into the building, which is in a posh neighbourhood in northwestern Beijing. Wearing red uniforms, their hair tied back in buns, they worked at a local 24-hour hot pot joint, and slept in bunk beds in the three-bedroom apartment next door. Occasionally I ran into them in the lift. We chatted about their work and about Beijing (“I’m getting used to the smog, but my skin always feels dry.”)
This amiable arrangement continued until a few weeks ago, when a man from downstairs knocked on my parents’ door, asking Dad to sign a letter of complaint. “They’ve been very loud,” he gestured at next door. “But they don’t even use mobile phones around here,” Dad said. “Anyway, we also suspect they brought cockroaches into the building,” the man went on. “Those waidiren are dirty.”
“Waidiren,” or “people from out of town,” is a common phrase in Beijing, where the 21m population includes eight million migrants from other provinces. They are separated from local residents by the hukou system, a household registration status that denies them full access to local health care services and their children free public schooling. The policy has attracted much criticism in recent years, generating momentum for reform in key cities. Less discussed, however, is the casual discrimination they encounter.
Vast and diverse as China is, mass migration is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was set off by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1980s, and picked up speed in the 1990s, as coastal cities transformed into metropolises, tempting people across the country with career opportunities. Migrants from Sichuan, Hunan and Shandong swarmed into Beijing and Shanghai, turning the once-homogenous cities into melting pots of dialects and customs. This has not led to an outbreak of open-mindedness among locals, who readily fall back on stereotypes about outsiders. People from Henan, a province in central China, suffer a reputation for being untrustworthy; anyone from Guizhou and Shaanxi is probably poor and backward; while the men from Dongbei—an area that covers northeastern China—are said to be gangsters who beat their wives.
These perceptions haunt the lives of non-locals in big cities, who experience prejudice in numerous ways, from the unexplained rejection of job applications to unrequited love. Recently, I have found myself at a few school reunions, listening to confessions from female friends about their relationship dramas and criteria for suitors. “I much prefer guys from Beijing than elsewhere,” a friend muttered over a cup of bubble tea at McDonald’s. “Otherwise, all his out-of-town relatives would want to visit all the time, and crash at our house.” Another friend, who has been in a steady relationship for years, also has her qualms after visiting her boyfriend’s relatives in Shanxi province for the first time. “They are not from Beijing,” she sighed. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be expecting too much.”
Out of all regional groups, perhaps none is as stigmatised as the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people from China’s western region of Xinjiang. Widely seen as cunning and violent, these prejudices have become even more pronounced in recent months, following a number of terrorist attacks by Uighur separatists. In March, eight knife-wielding men in the southwestern city of Kunming killed 29 people at a railway station, and left over 100 injured, and there have been several attacks since then.
These incidents have directed public attention to the growing tension between Han Chinese and the Uighur minority, while also bringing the topic of regional discrimination to the fore. One post on the popular social network Weibo the day after the March knife attack seemed to strike a chord, being retweeted 94,000 times:
“After you see more of the society, you will realise: those from Xinjiang don’t always brandish a knife; those from Henan don’t all have sticky fingers; not all Cantonese eat everything, and the Sichuanese are not all addicted to mahjong; some people from Dongbei are shy, and some Shanghaiese are easy to get along with; Beijingers don’t really speak with a pompous air; and Tibetans aren’t always picking fights. Come on, we are mature adults, yet we observe this world through assumptions and biases. That, I believe, is the saddest thing about us Chinese.”
In the thousands of comments that followed, people applauded the observations and added their own. “I have a confession to make,” said a Sichuanese at the end of a long discussion thread. “I don’t play mahjong, and don’t even understand the rules.”
