Muslims in 20th Century China: Huihui and Uygur in Historical Perspective Questions and Themes • How have Muslims in China adapted to the immense changes since the 1930s: World War II, the CCP victory in 1949, the radical Maoist period (1957-1976), and the reforms since 1978? What about Muslims in Taiwan? • What can we learn from differences within and between these groups? How diverse are they? Does it make sense to fashion generalizations about them as Muslims? As members of particular minzu? What kind of information would enable us to answer these questions? • How has globalization (however you may define it) affected the lives of Muslims in China? Have they all been affected in the same ways? • What has been the role of religion in the self-identification of these folks? In others’ perceptions of them? Some Sino-Muslims of the Republican Period: What do all these people have in common? Clockwise from upper left: Bai Chongxi, a Guomindang general from Guangxi province An unknown Muslim woman from Gansu province Ma Jian, a Muslim modernist from Yunnan province who studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo and translated the Analects of Confucius into Arabic Ma Fuxiang, one of the Ma family warlords of Gansu, famed for his Chinese calligraphy and political ambition (see FS, pp. 167-177) Bai Shouyi, a Marxist historian from Kaifeng, in Henan province, who joined the CCP and published dozens of books after 1949 An unknown imam/ahong from Yinchuan (Ningxia) Who are we? Han Chinese believers in Islam (回教说 ) or a separate ethnic group, the Hui (回族说 )? On what basis can we answer that question? Gu Jiegang, a great historian, argued that the Sino-Muslims are Han who are Muslims. Bai Shouyi, also a great historian, contended that the Sino-Muslims are a separate minzu, with separate ethnic origins and entirely separate identity. Gu Jiegang Which was right, and Bai Shouyi how do you know? Why did the Hui become a minzu? What “non-Han” people did the CCP know in Yan’an? Sino-Muslims Mongol s Li Weihan, senior CCP leader, author of the first CCP monograph on the Hui, 回回民族问题 , in the Yan’an period. He agreed with some Sino-Muslims that the CCP is a separate minzu, though it lacks many characteristics of such a group. This became CCP policy. How are Hui different from other minzu? Happy minorities in the PRC 1955 “We have become one great minzu family!” Happy minorities in the PRC 1957 “We are almost all female and attractive!” Happy minorities in the PRC 1960 “We are united behind ChairmanMao!” Happy minorities in the PRC 1975 “We sing! We dance! We wear colorful clothing!” How did non-Han peoples’ lives actually change in the PRC during the Mao period? (What did it mean to the Sino-Muslims that they were included in this minzu paradigm as a minority people?) Definition and assimilation Industrialization Sedentarization Education Secularization What impact did secularization by an avowedly atheistic state have on a people whose distinctiveness was partially or largely defined by religion? In the summer of 1975, the People’s Liberation Army surrounded and attacked the Muslim town of Shadian, in Yunnan province, where a group of local people had doggedly requested that their mosques be re-opened, going as far as Beijing to present their petitions. The town’s mosques had been closed as religious institutions and desecrated, their religious leaders humiliated, as part of the anti-religion activism of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The 1975 Shadian leaders based their claim on their minzu’s right to practice its religion. Over a thousand people were killed and the town leveled by artillery and heavy gunfire. In the years after Mao’s death, the PRC government apologized for the destruction and has invested heavily in Shadian since the early 1980s. The “incident” was blamed on the Gang of Four. The New Mosque in Shadian, Yunnan, replacing one destroyed by the PLA in 1975 Look at the Sino-Muslim (Hui) people on the next slide. Some are pious Muslims, but at least one professes himself an atheist. Most do not eat pork, but at least one almost certainly does. One is a university professor, one an imam. Some of the men wear white hats, but some do not. One is a Vice Minister of the People’s Republic of China’s government. Some of them wear “modern” clothing, but some do not. At least one is a committed Sufi who spends part of each day reading the Masnavi of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, a huge religious poem written in Persian. Some of the women cover their hair, but some do not. What do they all have in common? Hui Faces Today Uygur Faces (compare these to the Hui faces—what do they have in common?) Mosques in China: Chinese Style (Ming period) Mosques in China: “Contemporary” Style Two Mosques in Urumchi, Xinjiang Only Hui pray in one, only Uygurs in the other. Some Muslim neighborhoods in China—Kunming, Shenyang—have been razed as part of urban renewal, their historic mosques destroyed and their people scattered to the suburbs. Some Muslim neighborhoods—Zhengzhou, Xi’an—have been preserved, with their mosques, despite pressure to tear them down. Some neighborhoods have been destroyed but their historic mosques preserved as tourist attractions— Kashgar, Beijing. What do you think might differentiate these different fates for urban Muslims in China? Zhang Chengzhi, an ambiguous Hui A Red Guard leader in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Chengzhi now represents the “search for roots” movement in Chinese literature. He has become a pious Muslim, aided in translating Arabic texts into Chinese, and calls the Qing period Jahriyya Muslim rebels of southern Ningxia his role models. His novel about the Jahriyya, History of the Soul (心靈史 ), was the most popular fiction in China in 1994. Some Final Questions 1. What does Lipman mean by “evolution of a sense of home” (FS, p. xxxvi)? How would you describe that evolution over the past hundred years? 2. How would you describe the interaction of religion and modernity in the lives of 20th century Sino- Muslims? 3. Can you define the Huizu? What gives it definition and coherence? .