Few visitors to Mainland China will have failed to notice the industrious people wearing white caps and selling food from small shops displaying green signboards with the Chinese characters ching chen (清真), “pure and true.” These people, the Hui (回) or Chinese Muslims, as they are often called, are members of the largest of China's fifty-five recognized minority nationalities and are the focus of Dru Gladney's perceptive study, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic.
Within China, the Hui have oftentimes been considered ritually and, perhaps, morally suspect by the majority Han population. This is not specifically because of their foreign origins, since many non-Chinese have been assimilated into Chinese culture without developing an enduring sense of ethnic apartness. Rather, it is because the Hui avoid certain practices, such as eating pork, which is fundamental to Chinese ritual and cuisine. There is, however, something much more important than food proscription involved. The Hui's definition of their world as pure and true reverses the polarities of what is sacred and profane in China – it calls pure a community that rejects Chinese ritual values, and calls true a group that follows one God to the exclusion of all others.
The concept of ching chen is so central to Hui ethno-religious concern that it has become the very profession of their faith. The monotheistic formula, that there is no God but Allah. and Mohammed is his prophet, is known in Arabic as the shahadah; the Hui refer to it in Chinese as ching chen yen(清真言), or “the words of ching chen.” In fact, the Hui did not even bother to transliterate the term Islam – yi szu lan (伊斯蘭) – until very recently. Instead, the combination of ching and chen seemed best to capture and express their deepest concerns as Muslims living in the Chinese world. “Pure” reflected their concern to legitimate themselves in a Confucian society. “Truth” and belief in the true God distinguished them as monotheists in a land where polytheistic belief and practice predominated.
Gladney points out a subtle irony here. In China, the Han have at times looked down on the Hui as dirty, larcenous, and immoral. They are also repelled by Hui acceptance of surname endogamy: in Han Confucian society, it was (and often still is) unthinkable to marry someone of the same surname. But the Hui, by their very choice of translation, portray their ethno-religious identity as more “pure and true” than the Han. As the Hui adapted this identity to various Chinese sociopolitical contexts and to the tides of Islamic influence arriving from the Middle East and Central Asia, it has led to a wide diversity of Hui identities and Islamic orders in China. It has also influenced the nature of their interaction and conflict with the Mainland Chinese state.
An important factor in this diversity is the different routes by which the ancestors of the modern-day Hui reached China. Gladney distinguishes four different tides of Muslim influence on China. The earliest Muslim communities were descended from Arab, Persian, Central Asian, and Mongolian Muslim merchants, militia, and officials. They settled along China's southeast coast and in the northwest in both large and small numbers between the seventh and fourteenth centuries.
Known as the gedimu, from the Arabic qadim, meaning “old,” these communities were typically small, independent, and clustered around a central mosque. The isolation of these gedimu communities and their thin dispersion throughout China reveal the importance of trade to the Hui. Hui villages can be found throughout China, particularly along the main transport routes of the Yellow River in the north and the Burma road in the south. Hui have traditionally been among the most astute entrepreneurs in China.
A powerful opinion group emerges – Better roads, higher literacy rates, and pilgrimages to Mecca have brought together the mainland's isolated Hui communities as never before.
The second tide of Islam into China began in the late seventeenth century and is associated with the Sufi movement of Islam. Many Sufi groups in China developed socioeconomic and religio-political institutions centered around schools built by the descendants of early Sufi leaders. These so-called saintly lineages obtained contributions from their followers and amassed substantial amounts of property, gradually replacing the gedimu pattern of isolation and linking together adherents of Islam. Widening social integration, which was particularly successful in China's northwest, enabled the leaders of these groups to harness Muslim political and economic power. This also greatly facilitated the rise of Muslim warlordism in the twentieth century.
A third tide in Chinese Islam began in the closing days of the Ching dynasty at the turn of this century, a period of accelerated exchange between China and the outside world. Many more Chinese Muslims than ever before made the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. They also began to study at Cairo's prestigious Al-Azhar University. Within China, numerous Muslim associations were founded, and the Muslim press flourished. Although the circulation of individual journals was quite low, more than a hundred Muslim periodicals were being published prior to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. This was a time to re-evaluate the meaning of Islam, with numerous doctrinal controversies arising. As Gladney observes, many of these were attempts to relate the world religion of Islam to the local Chinese realm, and the debates themselves helped to enhance the meaning of being Muslim among its adherents.
The fourth, and contemporary, tide concerns the role of Muslims as a number of many separate nationalities, each asserting a greater role within the Chinese state. These Muslims – as nationalities, rather than as Muslims alone – have accepted the labels of Hui, Uighur, Tajik, and Kazakh that the state has assigned them, and they are making use of statecreated organizations such as the China Islamic Organization and the State Nationalities Commission to call for more power in determining their own affairs.
Like the three previous tides, this fourth current was precipitated by China's opening to the outside world. Beijing's policy actually encouraged China's Muslim population to have closer relations with the Middle East, albeit for reasons that had nothing to do with religion. The leadership was motivated partly by a desire to establish trading partnerships for arms, commodities, and currency exchanges, and partly by its traditional view of China being a leader of the Third World.
In what amounts to state-sponsored religious tourism, delegations of foreign Muslims regularly travel to prominent Islamic sites in Mainland China, and they are encouraged to make donations to Muslim communities. Although Beijing hopes that private Islamic investment will assist economic development, Gladney's data show that the vast majority of grants by visiting foreign Muslims have been designated for the rebuilding of Islamic mosques, schools, and hospitals. As the Hui and other Islamic nationalities of China are further exposed to Islamic internationalism, and as they return from studies and pilgrimages abroad, Gladney suggests that traditional identities will once again be reshaped and called into question.
The Hui are China's most widely dispersed nationality, inhabiting every region, province, and city. According to census data, there are Hui living in all but 3 percent of the mainland's counties and cities. Although representing, except in Ningxia province, only a small fraction of the population, Hui often make up the vast majority of the minority population in Han-dominated areas. For example, only 0.5 percent of the population of Anhui province are Hui, but Hui nonetheless represent more than 97 percent of Anhui's total minority population. The Hui also have diverse occupations, although there are certain occupational niches in which they excel. In addition to being restauranteurs and traders, Hui have historically controlled the caravan (now truck-transport) routes in many areas and have produced many outstanding military officers.
Given this diversity of origins, distribution, and occupations, one might expect a comparable diversity of customs, and indeed this is the case. There are Hui in Yunnan who speak only the Bai language, favor traditional Bai dress, and have female imams, or prayer leaders. The so-called Tibetan Hui of Lhasa speak Tibetan, wear Tibetan clothing, and worship in a mosque decorated with traditional Tibetan motifs and Tibetan carpets.
Foreign researchers in the mainland typically face a frustrating set of restrictions on their interview sources and movement. But Gladney, an anthropologist by training, was able to obtain permission to do field work in four different Hui communities: a Sufi village in the northwest, a neighborhood in Beijing, a northern suburban village, and a lineage community on the southeast coast. His findings, based on a total of three years of field research between 1982 and 1990, while not unexpected, nonetheless make fascinating reading.
The experience of the Sufi village, Na Homestead in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, seems to confirm what many visitors to other northwestern Muslim communities have noted: Islamic conservatism has become more pronounced among the Hui since 1979, when Beijing relaxed its control on religious practices. Many villagers pray five times a day and followed the Islamic calendar, suggesting that the rhythm of their lives is much different from the rest of China.
Unlike many other Hui areas in mainland China, Na Homestead has neither experienced a sharp decrease in public school enrollment nor an increase in children studying the Koran in local mosques. Nevertheless, many of the young people receive private religious instruction in their homes. Smoking and drinking were recently prohibited in the village, because the elders opposed the practices in the name of maintaining a ching chen lifestyle. There has been an increase in arranged marriages, and men and women are less likely to work together in the fields. At the time of Gladney's study, no one from Na Home-stead had been admitted to the Communist Party since 1976. When Gladney asked one Hui party member how he could rationalize the contradiction between communist atheism and his Muslim faith, he replied “I believe in Marxism in my head, but I believe in Islam in my heart.”
Oxen Street, in the southeast corner of Beijing, has the city's highest concentration of Hui as well as its largest and oldest mosque. The surrounding neighborhood has numerous ching chen restaurants. two Hui schools. the headquarters of the Chinese Islamic Association. and even a Hui hospital. Still. as in other urban settings, there are many Han nearby. Notions of ching chen have been modified in accordance with different situations. Han are familiar with Hui customs and are generally sensitive to actions that might provoke the Hui. For example. they keep their pigs confined to their yards. For the Hui in places like Beijing and Shanghai. pork avoidance is justified in terms of the unhealthy qualities of the pig. It would appear to be more a matter of cleanliness than religiosity. not dissimilar to germ evasion in the West.
Attendance at prayers in cities is noticeably lower, and ching chen restaurants have come to serve urban Muslims as centers for cultural dissemination. Although it would be considered scandalous in the more conservative northwest, young Hui males can meet young Hui females in an atmosphere which, from their parents point of view. is far preferable to that of a Han restaurant. Given the difficulty of finding Hui spouses for their children, many parents value the ching chen restaurant's function as a meeting place. Gladney summarizes urban ethno-politics in terms of choosing an ethnic spouse, registering one's child as a minority, maneuvering for advantage in school, work, and the marketplace, and regular celebration of ethnic festivals. In these ways the Hui almost unnoticed, have maintained their own world within Chinese cities.
Changying Hui Village, twenty kilometers east of Beijing, is in many respects intermediate between urban Hui practices and those of the rural northwest. The village was classified a brigade under the now-abandoned commune system and comprises eleven production teams. Three are completely Han; the other eight are 95 percent Hui. The 5 percent Han no longer eat pork or raise pigs, in deference to the Hui. The frequency of attendance at prayers is little more than half of that in Na Homestead, although greater than in Oxen Street. The issue of “unpurified blood,” or taking in Han as spouses, is not considered so great a problem as in Na Homestead. In addition. women take part in prayers. Some young people admit to smoking and drinking outside their homes. but they do not violate locally accepted norms of ching chen.
Despite the more relaxed attitude in Changying Village toward unpurified blood, intermarriage with Han remains extremely rare. Hui parents are reluctant to have their daughters move away. and there is a good deal of lineage endogamy. High levels of intermarriage among relatives has caused concern about birth defects, and indeed a number of students in the local Hui elementary school suffer from learning disabilities. Though they would probably find life in Na Home-stead a considerable adjustment, the Hui of Changying regard the Hui of Beijing insufficiently ching chen. In Beijing, they explain, it is too difficult to find a Hui spouse. to have more than one child, or even to obtain a ching chen meal.
The fourth and final of Gladney's research sites, Chendai town in Fujian, is in many ways the most interesting. For several decades, the residents of thirteen villages. all with the single surname of Ding, sought to be formally recognized as Hui. But the evidence against their being Hui seemed overwhelming. Like their Han neighbors. Chendai people speak the Fujian dialect. Like good Confucians, they light incense to ancestors in their lineage temple. They do not believe in Islam, and publicly disregard all Muslim dietary restrictions, including the consumption of pork.
On the other hand, members of the Ding family could produce an abundance of family genealogies, gravestones and steles with Arabic inscriptions, and dynastic records as proof of their origins. Their ancestor-worship rituals, although otherwise similar to those of the Han, prohibit the use of pork or pork byproducts as offerings, since the ancestors are known to have a taboo against it. Even the ancestral hall itself is not Confucian in design, being composed of a square inner building surrounded by a larger outer one – the exact shape of the character for Hui.
The state formally accepted the Ding lineage's claim in 1979. Immediately thereafter, the lineage, in a highly symbolic move. relocated the graves of its earliest ancestors to the historic Lingnan Holy Islamic Tombs outside Quanzhou. Interest in celebrating Muslim festivals grew, with some people arguing in favor of fasting during Ramadan. Surname endogamy. always practiced to some extent by the lineage, increased, and there was talk of building a mosque. In sum, formal recognition of the Dings' status as Hui led to ethnic revitalization and a rediscovery of their Muslim heritage.
While the diversity of Hui communities Gladney portrays might call into question their own slogan. “All Hui under heaven are one family,” and allay the Beijing government's fears of militant Muslim revival, the data do not lead to so clear a conclusion. The better roads, higher literacy rates. and pilgrimages to Mecca encouraged by the mainland's recent policies have brought together isolated Hui communities as never before. Networks have been established, and a transnational pan-Hui identity may be emerging. These same policies have also inadvertently encouraged cooperation between Hui and other Muslim minorities, both within and outside China.
Protest movements – the most recent of which concerned a book that depicted Muslims praying next to a pig – have become larger and better coordinated. During the fall of 1993. there were reports of widely scattered bombings that coincided with a meeting of Islamic militants in the northwestern city of Kashgar, which included representatives from Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Kashmir, as well as several different groups of the mainland's own Muslims. At the same time, there were demonstrations in Hui areas of Gansu province. Such occurrences are not necessarily the harbingers of successful separatism. But they do indicate the emergence of a powerful opinion group to which the mainland's policymakers must be sensitive. – June Teufel Dreyer teaches political science at the University of Miami, Coral Cables. Her latest book is China's Political System: Modernization and Tradition (1993).