Coming to Terms with the Nation The Remaking of Hui Identity in Republican China Wenhong Xie Division III project 2011, Hampshire College Chair: Kay Johnson Member: Jim Wald Jonathan Lipman 1 Table of contents Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 I. Introduction 5 II. Stretching the Skin of the Chinese Nation: the Reconfiguration of China’s Late Qing Ethnic Frontiers 11 III. Translate and Transform: Translation of the Qur’an in Early Twentieth Century China 37 IV. Coming to Terms with the Nation: from "zhengjiao bu zhengguo" to “aiguo aijiao” 77 V. Language, Identity, and the Narration of Hui – the huijiao huizu bian in Republican China 126 VI. Muslim Education Reforms in Republican China – Between Islamic Modernism and the May Fourth 166 VII. Conclusion 217 Bibliography 223 2 Acknowledgements It has taken me a while to finish this thesis and in the process I have accumulated a large amount of debts to my friends and family for their support and for the inspiration they have provided. Many thanks to my parents, for bring me into the world, for raising me, feeding me, clothing me, working to sustain me, for their undying support and for everything they taught me. Many thanks to my friends – especially Felix Lufkin, Devin Roark, Mike Nord, Craig Surette, Gu Xiaolei, Wang Yimeng – for distracting me, feeding me, and for everything they taught me; and to my fellow human beings – family members – who worked each day to support me in their own work – those farmers who grew the food I ate, the workers wrapped and prepared it and stocked the market shelves, those who sewed my clothes, who worked to heat the house in which I live, those that drove the bus that I rode to class, and those that taught those classes and assisted me with this work. Many thanks to my Div III committee: Jonathan Lipman, Kay Johnson, and Jim Wald. Jonathan Lipman ignited my interest in the Muslims in China, and continues to offer generously of his time, counsel, humor, and expertise. Kay Johnson guided me throughout my thesis with instructions, supports, encouragement and patience. Many thanks also to Pimp the cat, and Skunkie the skunk, who inspired, entertained and enriched my time in America, for bringing joy to my life. 3 Abstract This study examines various aspects of the life of Chinese Muslims during China’s Republican period (1911-1949) – their participation in Republican politics, their narrations of selfhood, and their education and religious reforms. While recognizing the important roles of the state (and its elites) in shaping minority identities, this study seeks to de-center the “state-centric” narratives by probing into the complicated processes of resistance, negotiation, and co-optation between China’s nationalist elites and its non-Han minorities in the making of the modern Chinese nation. Meanwhile, I hope to illustrate both Muslim and non-Muslim efforts of reconstructing modern national and religious subjects in China through dissemination, legitimation and transaction of post-Enlightenment vocabularies from the European world. Following a brief introduction of the method and purpose of this study in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 shows how early 20th century Han Chinese elites, confronted with catastrophic territorial failure, sought to simultaneously integrate the late-Qing “multiethnic” frontiers into the Chinese nation-state and “reinvent” the non-Han peoples through a variety of discursive, historical, and ethnographic devices. In Chapter 3, I seek to present the shifting views on the “translatability” of the Qur’an among the leading Sino-Muslim intellectuals, and the intended sociopolitical impact of Qur’anic translation from the point of view of its early Chinese translators. In Chapter 4, I focus on the discursive strategies on the part of Muslim intellectuals in their endeavor to transform the Muslim population in China from the imperial subjects to modern citizens of the Chinese nation-state. In Chapter 5, I seek to contextualize and analyze the conflicting political discourses over of the Sino-Muslim identity prior to its consolidation and objectification in the PRC. Finally, in Chapter 6, I hope to show how progressive Sino-Muslim intellectuals, by advancing Muslim Education Reforms, sought to simultaneously inherit and jettison their tradition. 4 Chapter 1 Introduction The small Mohammedan how deceitful is he! to buy only four ounces of pork he is weighing for a good half-day now he complains it is little and the he complains again it is little then folding in his arms a pig's head he runs home. - late 19th century Pekinese nursery rhyme (tongyao 童谣)1 Themes Muslim population in China, once “foreign sojourners” (fanke) of Arab and Central Asian descents, has never shed their “strangeness” in the eyes of the Han Chinese over their some 1300 years of living within the Sinitic community. Nevertheless, the Sino-Muslims, who continuously straddled social and cultural borders, experienced various patterns of coexistence with the Han “majority” as the political power, out of their own political concerns, adopted different schemes of seeing its population – divide and rule in Qing, unification in Republican China, regimentation in People’s 1 “小回回儿 怎么那么奸 四两猪肉约半天 左嫌小右嫌少 抱着猪头往家跑”. (Vitale , Guido. 1896. Chinese folklore: Pekinese rhymes. Pei-t'ang press, p. 68) 5 Republic. This study seeks to investigate the changes and continuities within the Sino-Muslim communities in the first half of the 20th century – a crucial period during which the cultural and ethnic boundaries of the Chinese nation was (re)negotiated and reconfigured. I hope to show that Sino-Muslim population, because of their cultural in-betweenness and social marginality, had to “come to terms” with the nationalist projects of the Republican China in ways very different from their Han neighbors. By presenting the Sino-Muslim intellectuals’ various, often conflicting, conceptions and articulations of the notions of modernity, religion, ethnicity and nationhood during China’s transition from an empire to a modern nation-state, I seek to illustrate – mainly from the perspectives of the male, urban elites of China’s Muslim minority – the complex processes through which the subject is raced, nationed, and religioned in the modern era. While historian Eric Hobsbawn famously proclaimed that it was the states and their elites created the nation and not the reverse,2 other scholars, such as Prasenjit Duara, insist approaching national history as “a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels.”3 This study was animated by the latter kind of sensibility. While recognizing the state’s important role in shaping minority identities in the time of nationalism, I seek 2 Hobsbawn 1990, p. 44 3 Duara 1996, back cover. 6 to de-center the “state-centric” narratives by attending to the complicated processes of resistance, negotiation, and co-optation between the nationalist elites and the ethnic/religious minorities in the processes of making modern Chinese nation. In particular, I hope to show that, as also argued in Mao Yufeng’s recent study, by presenting alternative narratives of selfhood and visions for the Chinese nation, Sino-Muslim elites have demonstrated their own agency in China’s nation building project.4 Meanwhile, in light of Dru Gladney, Jonathan Lipman and other scholars’ examination of the “relational” construction of majority and minority identity in China, I also probe into the links between the assertion of a national identity of Hui and the making of Han majority in China’s period of transition from the empire to the nation-state.5 Methodology In a seminal book, Lydia Liu highlighted the revealing capacity of discourse analysis in historical inquiries. By focusing on the transmissions of the notions of modernity through triangulated translations between China, Japan and the West, Liu argues that we may expand the horizon of history as a discipline by “treating language, discourse, and text (including historical writing itself) as genuine historical events, not the least of which is power of discursive acts to produce the terms of 4 Mao 2011. 5 Lipman 1997, p. XXXV 7 legitimation in shaping the historical real.”6 Due to the nature of my primary sources and the type of questions raised in this study, I also pay special attention to language-related issues in the 20th century Chinese history – linguistic collisions, cross-linguistic borrowing, conditions of translation and other discursive practices, to reveal the dimension of discursive struggles in the modern processes of nation building and identity formation. In particular, I hope to illustrate both the Muslim and non-Muslim’s efforts of reconstructing modern national and religious subjects in China through dissemination, legitimation and transaction of new concepts from the post-Enlightenment European world. Meanwhile, I hope to show that while categories and categorization often serve as one of the most useful tools by which the political authorities exert their discursive power, due to the novelty and general “untriedness” of modern vocabularies in the early 20th century China, they also opened up fields of conflicting representations. Sources This study is indebted to a large number of existing scholarly literatures on the subjects of the history of (Chinese) nationalism, the making of majority/minority identities, the relationship between language and the construction of reality, and the Muslims in China in past and present. In particular, my research draws