Chinese Muslim Americans Fear U.S. Alliance with China

When Mohammed Salah Lin was invited to Michigan to lecture on Chinese and international trade in January 2001, he expected to return to China after a three-month stay. A year later, after Beijing authorities linked him to a September 2000 Muslim uprising in China, he is afraid to return home.

Lin, 41, is now one of about 300 Chinese Muslims living in Los Angeles, and part of a smaller group of Chinese Muslims who gather once a month to talk about religious tenets, social values and their Chinese identities. Reticent to draw attention to himself as he struggles to bring his family to America, Lin refused to use his real name.

Lin and others are not overtly political, but do watch U.S. policy toward China. In January, the Chinese government released a report linking the Muslim Uighur separatist movement in Xinjiang province with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. "Terrorism is a threat to both our countries," Bush said on his recent Beijing visit. Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin agreed to increase anti-terrorism cooperation. China's support for the war in Afghanistan was important to the Bush administration.

Lin is grateful for the religious freedom he has found in the United States. But he worries that America knows too little of the plight of Muslims in China.

"The U.S. government supports Buddhists in Tibet but not Muslims in Xinjiang," he said.

Trouble for Lin -- a Hui Muslim from Gansu, a western province that borders Xinjiang -- started in China two years ago. Formerly an economics professor at a Chinese university, Lin was lecturing in Shandong province in China in September 2000 when a conflict broke out between Muslim and non-Muslim locals in the nearby town of Liu Miao.

According to Lin, Muslims accused a butcher of selling pork in a halal meat shop (a shop that prepares meat according to Muslim religious guidelines) and of hanging a pig's head on the entrance to the local mosque. Swine are considered unclean in Islam. In response, Chinese Muslims from Shandong, Shanxi and Hebei provinces gathered to protest. Many were also angry with the local government, and saw the incident as an example of authorities' disrespect for their religious needs.

"It was a totally peaceful protest, and nobody was carrying weapons, but the protesters were met by armed police who fired into the crowd," Lin said. Thirty-nine Muslims were killed and hundreds injured and arrested, according to Lin.

"This was a massacre of Muslims by the Chinese government," he says.

After the incident, Lin says he had an "obligation as an educated Muslim and a scholar to investigate." In December 2000 he reported his findings anonymously via e-mail to Muslim contacts and scholars all over China.

After coming to America, Lin found that the Chinese Public Security Bureau had traced his e-mails and sent warnings to his wife and son in China. "They ransacked our house and took their passports away." Now he doesn't dare return to China, and his family is barred from leaving.

"I told my lawyer everything, but he said that no judge will grant me religious asylum in America as a Muslim. He told me to say that I was a member of Falun Gong." A devout Muslim, Lin refused to claim he was a member of the Chinese sect, rooted in Buddhism, that Beijing has attempted to eradicate. Because Lin's wife was forced by the government to get an abortion, he claimed to be persecuted by China's one-child policy and won asylum.

The men and women who attend the Los Angeles group include recent immigrants and American citizens, Chinese speakers and Arabic speakers, devout Muslims and those who are still learning about the Quran. Some are from Taiwan, others were born in America, and many, like Lin, are among the over 30 million Muslims of mainland China.