WIRED

Members of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority have long found it difficult to travel domestically. Police harassment and widespread racism mean they are effectively barred from checking into many hotels. Airbnb doesn’t help with the problem.

Dozens of listings on the Chinese version of Airbnb openly discriminate against Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other ethnic minorities by barring them from renting rooms. The revelation comes as Airbnb is making a high-profile push into the country.


Want to book a comfortable two-bedroom apartment in the central city of Chongqing? That’s fine, unless you are Uyghur, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority from China’s far Western region of Xinjiang who are currently the victims of a campaign of mass detentions.

As the listing reads: “We do not have the permission of the police station” to host Uyghurs, so “please do not book”. Another ad for a flashy Chengdu condo complete with a flat screen TV and a painting of a bulldog explains in English that Tibetan and Uyghur guests are not allowed “Due to local regulation [sic]”.

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We found 35 separate Airbnb listings in China with similar clauses explicitly barring certain ethnic minorities, mostly Uyghurs but in many cases Tibetans, another troublesome minority with separatist leanings in Beijing’s eyes. After WIRED contacted Airbnb’s press team for this story, 15 of the 35 were suddenly taken down.

Other minorities are included as well: one since-deleted listing banned any member of the mostly Muslim Hui people, a community that’s reportedly facing increasing repression in China amid rising Islamophobia, while another banned Kazakhs, another mostly Muslim ethnic minority which has been caught up in China’s Xinjiang crackdown.


“In general the process in China is that any hotel that hosts Uyghurs would get an obligatory police visit,” says Maya Wang, senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “These facilities generally ban any Uyghurs or any Xinjiang residents, which is of course highly discriminatory, to prevent themselves getting in trouble with the authorities.”

In recent years, Airbnb has aggressively expanded into China, a huge, lucrative market where it is one of the few Western tech giants whose website is not blocked by the Chinese government. In 2017 Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky even fought off a merger attempt with a local competitor, avoiding the fate of Uber, which ended operations in exchange for a stake in Chinese rival Didi Chuxing.

Airbnb removed around half the listings we identified. A spokesperson for the company said it took reports of discrimination seriously and evaluated them on a “case-by-case basis”.

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The take-downs come at a time when Airbnb has reversed a decision to remove listings for properties location in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In November 2018 it had removed around 200 rental properties which it said were “at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.” But at the start of April it settled four lawsuits and allowed properties in the area to be relisted.


Airbnb’s China subsidiary is called “Aibiying”, which the firm sent veteran entrepreneur Tao Peng to run in 2018. “China is a critical priority for Airbnb,” Peng said in March. To expand, Airbnb is closer than ever before to China’s notoriously fickle regulators. Airbnb made headlines in March last year when it announced it would comply with China’s long-running guest registration system, which requires hosts to register foreign guests with police when they check in.

That system is often cited by Chinese Airbnb hosts to explain the discriminatory clauses: almost all of the listings that ban minorities also ban foreigners, stating they don’t have official permission to host non-citizens, as is the case with many hotels in China. But Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other minorities are fully-fledged Chinese citizens, and there aren’t any national-level Chinese laws stating they merit extra police scrutiny.

Locally, however, it’s a more complicated story. In one case last year, a landlord was fined and arrested for hosting Uyghurs without registering them with police. Authorities stated that he violated China’s 2015 counter-terrorism law, which penalizes the “refusal to cooperate with relevant departments' counter-terrorism safety precautions,” according to Chinese legal website China Law Translate. Ahead of the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s main meeting in 2017, police in Shenzhen reportedly instituted an outright ban on Uyghurs staying in hotels, regardless of whether they were registered with police or not; one hotel was fined 15,000 yuan for noncompliance.

Nevertheless, James Leibold, a Xinjiang and Tibet expert who is a professor at Australia’s La Trobe University, says the Airbnb listings “violate existing Chinese legislation outlawing racial or ethnic discrimination, with Article 4 of the PRC Constitution, for example, protecting the equality of all minzu [minority] groups and outlawing ‘discrimination against and oppression of any nationality’.”

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The open discrimination comes as no surprise to Adiljan Abdurihim, a 34-year-old Uyghur software developer and activist now living in Norway. Whenever Abdurihim’s relatives tried to stay in hotels in Beijing, the front desk would call up local police as soon as they handed over their ID.

Hours of interrogation would follow, an intimidating process which usually ended with them being sent off to different accommodation approved by authorities. Some of Abdurihim’s family members resorted to sleeping in Beijing’s airport to avoid the ordeal, which would sometimes last their entire stay.

Little has changed. Amid anongoing security crackdown, growing domestic Islamophobia, and almost no avenues for legal recourse in a one-party state with no independent judiciary, Chinese police continue to zealously interrogate Uyghurs upon checking into hotels or guesthouses. (Foreign visitors are rarely subject to such treatment.)

The process is made especially simple thanks to China’s system of compulsory national ID cards which are required for check-in and include not just a person’s full name, gender, address, and date of birth but also their ethnicity. Discrimination against minority guests is often referenced on Chinese internet forums, where worried receptionists post about forgetting to inform police that guests from Xinjiang just checked in. One person claimed their pay was docked after they forgot to inform police that people from Xinjiang were staying there and the hotel was fined 3,000 yuan (about £345).

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Airbnb officially bans racial discrimination, which may be why some of the discriminatory China state that they do not allow foreigners in English but only say they don’t accept Uyghurs in Chinese.

Uyghurs are subject to intense scrutiny in China due to government fears of a Muslim separatist movement in Xinjiang, where the state-sponsored migration of China’s Han ethnic majority has, among other factors, spurred race riots and sporadic terrorist attacks. As a result, it’s never been easy for Uyghurs to do things most Chinese citizens take for granted.

In March the South China Morning Post exposed how labor contractors working in factories manufacturing iPhones had put up posters that explicitly stated that Uyghurs should not apply. However, the level of repression has been heightened since 2016, with authorities shipping off vast numbers of Uyghurs to modern-day ‘re-education camps’. Using facial recognition technology and big data, the state has built a huge surveillance operation. One database that leaked online included addresses, government ID numbers and last-known locations of millions of people – 28.3 per cent of them were Uyghur.

According to the Financial Times, police in Xinjiang have created an app to monitor Uyghurs. The app collects personal information, including location data and whether a person uses WhatsApp, to highlight suspicious behaviour. It is just one tool in a blunt surveillance network that is meant to discriminate against Uyghurs.

China’s leadership generally doesn’t mention Uyghurs. But when it does, it’s usually in binary terms: as law-abiding secular Chinese citizens or as people poisoned by the “evil” of “religious extremist thought”, as top Communist Party official Shohrat Zakir (himself a Uyghur) stated in October. Lower-level officials and Party-affiliated organisations have used stronger language, comparing those influenced by extremists to “tumours” or “viruses” that must be removed.

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Outside China, Airbnb is no stranger to charges of discrimination. The hashtag #airbnbwhileblack went viral on Twitter after black users complained of racism on the site. A 2016 study found guests with distinctively African-American names were 16 per cent less likely to be accepted by hosts.

More recently, in April, the site came under scrutiny after white nationalists in the US used Airbnbs as accommodation to attend the notorious American Renaissance Conference. In those cases, Airbnb has been responsive. To address racial discrimination by hosts, it banned them from requesting photos of potential guests in an attempt to ensure they weren’t screening out minorities. As for the white nationalists, Airbnb promptly canceled reservations and banned hosts that were part of the racist movement.

But Airbnb’s discrimination policy has two sections: one for the United States and the European Union, and another for the rest of the world. The latter specifies that “some countries or communities may allow or even require people to make accommodation distinctions based on, for example, marital status, national origin, gender or sexual orientation, in violation of our general nondiscrimination philosophy”.

The policy says Airbnb does not “require” its hosts break local laws or expose themselves to arrest because of who is staying in their properties. The section states hosts should “set out any such restriction” in their listing and do so using “clear, factual, non-derogatory terms”.

Given that almost all the Airbnb China hosts that ban Uyghurs announce the policy in a formulaic manner, and that there’s been no apparent effort from Airbnb to remove such clauses, questions remain as to whether Airbnb China has sanctioned the practice. Airbnb’s current page about booking accommodation in China, while noting that foreigners’ ID will be required to check-in and that this information may be sent to authorities, makes no mention of the rights of Uyghur, Tibetan, or other ethnic minority guests.

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Airbnb runs the risk of backlash in the form of boycotts, criticism from rights groups, and other measures. “They shouldn’t be contributing to the practice of racism and discrimination in China against ethnic minorities,” said Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch. “There is nothing really black-and-white in Chinese law that you can discriminate against minorities, including Uyghurs, from staying in a hotel. There is room for companies to push back.”

Leibold agrees. He says: “Airbnb must urgently condemn, in public, such blatant examples of discrimination, and delist anyone who attempts to use its brand and platform to discriminate against others.”

Updated 03.05.19, 15:15 BST: A comment from Airbnb has been added.

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