Most of the hotel clerks, mistaking them for foreigners, welcomed them and offered a room. But when the couple pulled out their identity cards, the clerks realized they were Muslim Uyghurs from China. And then the response was always the same: Sorry, no room at the inn.

Turned away by every hotel, the family rented an old car for $20 a day and slept in it for two nights. The conditions were so poor that their two-month-old baby became sick. Finally, they abandoned the car and begged to stay at a cousin's overcrowded apartment.

Today the couple have given up. They are packing their bags and getting ready to leave Beijing this month, joining the thousands of other Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongolians who are fleeing under police pressure in the final weeks before the Olympics.

Beijing turns away minorities

I experienced this myself when I traveled in China with a Uyghur woman.  She spoke Chinese, I did not, so initially when we wanted to stay at hotels, she would ask for the room.  She was a Chinese citizen, had grown up in China, but was Caucasian.  With me, she was assumed to be a foreigner.  Yes, the clerk would say with a smile, there is a room available.  Then my friend would show her identity card and the clerk's smile would become a scowl.  Sometimes the room had disappeared, sometimes it was still available, but we had to fight to get it cleaned, fight to get the toilet unblocked.  We learned it was easier to get a room when I spoke English and used my gorgeous American passport. 

We stayed at one hotel for two weeks.  In that time, the clerk had realized my friend was Uyghur.  At the end of our stay, we checked out, then realized we had a 25-hour bus trip ahead of us, we'd better use the hotel toilet before we left.  I was kindly escorted to the hotel toilet; they tried to bar my friend from using it. 

More from the Globe and Mail:
Tibetans and Mongolians are under pressure to leave Beijing because they are seen as potential Olympic troublemakers. Many people in Tibet and Inner Mongolia want greater autonomy and religious freedom for their regions of China. A wave of protests swept through the Tibetan regions this spring, sparking a harsh crackdown from Chinese authorities.

The Uyghurs are under greater pressure than any other ethnic minority because the government sees them not only as potential protesters but also as potential terrorists. The entire Uyghur population is often seen as a security threat, even though only a tiny fraction have been involved in radical or separatist activities.

Until recently, Beijing was home to dozens of Uyghur restaurants, specializing in the popular grilled food of their Muslim homeland, Xinjiang, in the remote northwest of China. But most have been forced to close over the past two years as the security clampdown has tightened.

Nuer, who has worked in restaurants in Beijing for most of the past 15 years, estimates that 4,000 to 5,000 Uyghurs have been detained or expelled from Beijing as the city prepares for the Olympics. His estimate is impossible to verify, but a recent survey confirmed that many Beijing hotels are refusing to rent rooms to Uyghurs.

What the Globe and Mail doesn't say is there's another reason the Chinese government doesn't want these ethnic minorities in Beijing:  they'll tell the foreign visitors about their problems.  They'll speak to journalists.  China doesn't want the world to know about these problems.  China thinks it can keep the problems a secret. 

If China wants to be a world leader, it's going to have to learn it can't keep control.  It's going to have to learn to take criticism.  These will be hard lessons for China.