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.