Hotel in China's Shenzhen Fined for Breaking Muslim Uyghur Guest Ban

TEHRAN (IQNA) – Authorities in China’s southern province of Guangdong have fined the manager of a hotel in the border city of Shenzhen for breaking a ban on ethnic minority Uyghur guests ahead of the ruling Communist Party's five-yearly congress later this month.

An employee who answered the phone on Monday at the hotel in Shenzhen's Lo Wu district, near the internal border with Hong Kong, confirmed the fine.

"According to rules set by the local police station, we had to pay a fine for accepting a guest from Xinjiang," the employee said, in a euphemistic reference to the mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uyghur ethnic group.

"Security has been much tighter now that it's the 19th party congress, and there is a ban on people from Xinjiang," she said, adding that the hotel had been fined 15,000 yuan (U.S. $2,260) for breaking the rule.

"I know that you can't generalize about an entire group of people, and that any group has bad people in it, but we are being told [by police] that we can't have guests from Xinjiang."

An employee in a sauna in Shenzhen's Futian district said all service businesses had been required to demand IDs from customers since late September, as part of new security regulations linked to the 19th Party Congress.

The details would be immediately available to police via a shared database, and police could veto any guests they believed to be a threat, the employee said, RFA reported.