Destinations known | In China, Airbnb listings discriminate against Uygurs and other ethnic minority groups
- The home-sharing platform has asserted that its mission is ‘to democratise travel by allowing anyone to belong anywhere’
- But listings biased against Uygurs and Tibetans exist, in defiance of the company’s own non-discrimination policy
That all must sound pretty hollow to members of China’s ethnic minority groups, which are openly discriminated against in numerous Airbnb listings, according to a recent article in Wired magazine. Specific homes are highlighted, including one in Chengdu, Sichuan province, the owner of which notes that it does not “accommodate foreign tourists, Tibetan tourists, Uygur tourists and Chinese tourists who hold Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan ID cards”, in both simplified Chinese and English.
“We found 35 separate Airbnb listings in China with similar clauses explicitly barring certain ethnic minorities, mostly Uygurs but in many cases Tibetans, another troublesome minority with separatist leanings in Beijing’s eyes,” reports Wired.
After the magazine contacted Airbnb, 15 of those listings were removed.
But bias such as this is far from unusual for ethnic minority groups in China; for the Uygurs of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, a Turkic people who in the main practise Islam, discrimination is a daily reality. A Human Rights Watch report published on May 1 details how a mobile app used by police and officials in the area is effectively being employed to ethnically profile residents. Speaking to the South China Morning Post about the technology, Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: “The Chinese government is monitoring every aspect of people’s lives in Xinjiang, picking out those it mistrusts and subjecting them to extra scrutiny.”
