Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Politics and Geopolitics

Following Chiang Kai-shek's purge of the Chinese Communists from the first United Front (1924-27) and the outbreak of the first part of the civil war between the CCP and the Guomindang (Nationalist Party, GMD), the two parties gradually polarized around the "Muslim question." What was the status of the millions of Hui, who, unlike the Turkic Muslim peoples concentrated in the far northwestern province of Xinjiang,⁶ were scattered throughout the country and lacked a distinctive language? Were they Han Chinese who believed in Islam, or were they a distinct, ethnically defined nation, a minzu (also translated as "nationality," "ethnicity," and "ethnic group"), and therefore entitled to certain group rights, including designated representation at the National Assembly?⁷

After the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in northeast China and the establishment of a puppet state there in 1932, the need to maintain territorial integrity pulled GMD rhetoric and policy to a hard line: there was one Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu), and the Hui were part of it. Difference was only a matter of religious belief. By the late 1930s, the GMD insisted that officially registered Muslim institutions use the name "Islam" or "Islamic" (huijiao) rather than "Muslim" or "Hui people" (huimin), as the latter might suggest separate peoplehood or nationality. A 1940 law banned the use of the more controversial term, huizu, meaning "Muslim nation" or "Hui nation."⁸ Chiang Kai-shek himself insisted that the Huis differed from Han Chinese "only in terms of their religious belief." This view crystalized in 1943 with the publication of China's Destiny (Zhongguo zhi mingyun), which asserted that all the peoples of China descended from the single ancient bloodline of the Yellow Emperor. This religion-based classification provoked fierce criticism from the CCP, who, as we will see, differentiated themselves from the GMD by arguing that to view the Muslim question as simply a matter of religious belief was a gross simplification.⁹

Geopolitics shaped both parties' views as well. Japanese ambitions to divide and rule China by peeling off the large Muslim population in the northwestern provinces heightened the urgency of resolving the Muslim question. This pressure built on previous tensions between the racist (chiefly anti-Manchu) fervor that helped topple the (Manchu) Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the official rhetoric of the "Republic of Five Races" (wuzu gonghe) promoted by Sun Yat-sen around the Xinhai Revolution in an effort to retain for the republic the ethnically diverse borderlands of the old empire.¹⁰ Mongolian independence and the challenges to Chinese sovereignty in Tibet and Xinjiang in the 1910s to 1930s only intensified fears of a breakaway Muslim state in the northwest. The Japanese promoted pan-Islamism and emphasized divisions between Hui and Han, presenting themselves as the true defenders of Islam in China.¹¹ Thus for both the CCP and the GMD, working out the logic of Muslim political integration in modern China was not merely a matter of elaborating ideology but an urgent task in the fight to keep the country together.

Events in China did not take place in a vacuum. Over the course of the Republican period, connections between Hui and their coreligionists abroad intensified, a development the GMD and CCP both observed with a mix of keen interest and deep anxiety. On one hand, transnational Muslim solidarity that reached into China offered diplomatic advantages of which the GMD made increasing use. On the other hand, such solidarity could also threaten the unity of China, particularly amid the postwar drive for decolonization and national independence across the Muslim world.¹²

The situation in India was particularly alarming. Following the defeat of Japan in 1945, the GMD resumed its plans, put on hold after the Japanese invasion of July 1937, to convene a National Assembly to pass a national constitution. In accordance with the provisional constitution, the assembly would include representatives from every province, major national organizations and industries, and various peoples concentrated in the western and northern borderlands. While Tibetans, Mongols, and other groups were awarded special delegate quotas, the Hui, whom the GMD did not recognize as a distinct nation, enjoyed no such privileges. In the 1930s and 1940s, Islamic organizations in China rallied to gain an equivalent delegate quota and submitted petitions from local branch associations across the country to the government. Then-president of the Legislative Yuan (the legislature) Sun Ke (1891-1973, son of Sun Yat-sen) rejected the "Muslim proposal" on the grounds that if "followers of Islam" enjoyed special privileges, then followers of other religions would claim them too, and—alluding to Hindu-Muslim violence and the (potential) partition of the subcontinent—"the future Legislative Yuan would become a conference of churches, and we will inevitably go down the same path as India."¹³ It is telling both of the continued urgency of the Muslim question and the intensity of GMD anxiety about granting nationality status that Hui were ultimately granted seventeen delegates as "citizens of China proper with special life customs" (neidi shenghuo [End Page 363] xiguan teshu zhi guomin)—a rather awkward title that conspicuously avoided designating Huis as a nation.¹⁴

Debate over Ideology within the CCP

Liu Chun and the NQRA assessed these dynamics from the vantage of Yan'an, the mountain base area of Communist leadership between 1936 and 1948. Many cadres had arrived at the base after the Red Army's "Long March" through southern and western provinces after the GMD's siege of the Jiangxi Soviet in the early 1930s. These border regions were home to many of the peoples the CCP would later recognize as nations, and the Long March is seen as a foundational experience for the Party in terms of its ethnic policy. Even if the Red Army's legendary respect for these peoples' customs and religious practices is exaggerated, these encounters reinforced the CCP's commitment to recognizing minority peoples as distinct minzus.¹⁵

When it came to the Party's understanding of the Muslim question, just as important as the Long March were the debates over Marxist philosophy that took place after the march, at Yan'an. It was there, over many lectures and in dialogue with other party intellectuals, that Mao Zedong and his supporters articulated the "New Philosophy" (xin zhexue) that would become known as "Mao Zedong Thought" and, through study groups and Party schools, established it as Party orthodoxy.¹⁶ Among the questions Mao's growing wing of the party had to resolve included the validity of "mechanism" as well as the applicability of the Soviet model of revolution to China. By 1938, Maoist answers to these questions were clear: dialectical materialism was superior to mechanism, and Marxism had to be adapted—"China-ified" (zhongguo hua)—to the particular circumstances of China, even if this entailed substantial deviation from the Soviet model.¹⁷

The writing and publication of The Huihui National Question must be understood in the context of the debates over ideology and intraparty politics of Yan'an. The NQRA, under whose name the booklet was published, fell under the purview of the Central Committee's Northwest Work Committee (xibei gongzuo weiyuanhui), established in late 1938 and headed by Zhang Wentian (1900-1976) and Li Weihan (1896-1984), at the time two powerful cadres and close allies of Mao Zedong.¹⁸ Li himself authored parts of The Huihui National Question, initially published as separate articles in the Party journal Liberation (Jiefang) in spring 1940. Liu Chun's aforementioned article "What Is Islam?" was published in the July 1940 issue of Chinese Culture along-side writings by some of the Party's leading intellectuals, including Yang Song's (1907-42) "Concerning the Question of the Sinification of Marxism-Leninism,"¹⁹ Ai Siqi's (1910-66) "What Is Philosophy?,"²⁰ and Chen Boda's (1904-89) letter to Zhang Shenfu on New Philosophy.²¹

The Yan'an intellectual environment did not predetermine the conclusions of The Huihui National Question, but it did compel the authors to reconcile their claims with the new orthodoxy. They would have to explain why the Stalinist definition of the nation did not apply to the Hui, and how recognizing Islam as its basis did not contradict historical materialism. Turning now to the content of The Huihui National Question, we can see how the NQRA answered these critics. Their answers can be understood from the perspective of two basic questions: What is a nation? and What is Islam?

What Is a Nation?

The CCP based its definition of a "nation" (minzu) on the fourfold definition outlined by Stalin in his 1913 Marxism and the National Question: "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."²² As the anthropologist Dru Gladney has observed, the Hui fail to meet these standards: "It is Islam, or the memory of it, that is the only thing that all Hui have in common, and they are the sole minority in China to share only a religious identity."²³ How, then, was their nationality status justified? The authors of the The Huihui National Question did not reject the four Stalinist criteria for nationhood but argued instead that those criteria do not apply for the Hui. They determined that the Stalinist criteria applied only to "modern" and "fully formed" (wan zheng) nationalities such as the Han, but not to nationalities that were still in the process of formation, such as the Hui.

The modern/developing distinction broke with the Stalinist model as well as contemporary CCP theorizing on the national question. The distinction has no basis in Marxism and the National Question, which repeatedly emphasizes that lacking even one of the four characteristics disqualifies a group from national recognition.²⁴ Leading CCP intellectuals upheld this strict definition. Yang Song, at the time the secretary-general of the Party's Propaganda Department, had recently reiterated the need to meet all four criteria in his important August 1938 essay "On the Nation," which for the first time defined the Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu) as comprising distinct [End Page 364] nations (or nationalities, minzu) within China's borders. In that same essay, Yang includes the "Hui nation" (huizu) as one of those constituencies, but it is clear that he is talking about the Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang—indeed, he clarifies as much with a parenthetical note: "The Hui nation (formerly called the Turki nation)."²⁵ The apparent acceptance of the idea of a developing nation reflects the Party's pragmatic willingness to depart from the Stalinist model and further "China-ify" Marxism—not the logical persuasiveness of the NQRA's argument. Indeed, this was to be the first of many deviations from the Soviet model. As Leibold and Mullaney have shown, contemporary ethnology and early PRC nationality policy emphasized groups' self-representation and subjective consciousness.²⁶ If the departure from Stalin's clear definition of a nation was initially controversial, exigencies of the moment convinced CCP leadership that granting the Hui nationality status was the way forward.

But recognizing the Hui as a nation involved a second challenge to orthodoxy, at least in terms of how the authors of the Huihui National Question chose to make their argument. To exempt the Hui from Stalinist standards was one thing; to justify that exemption with reference to Islam was quite another. After the establishment of the PRC in October 1949, the Party set to work shoring up Hui policy in more ideologically acceptable terms. In his 1951 New Birth of the Huihui Nation (Huihui minzu de xinsheng), the first scholarly treatment of the Muslim question under the new regime, historian and ethnologist Bai Shouyi (1909-2000) attempted to demonstrate how the Hui did indeed exhibit "national characteristics" that could be assessed according to Stalin's four criteria, even if, as a "developing nation," they did not fully satisfy those standards. In rather strained reasoning, Bai claimed that the "wide dispersal, small concentrations" (da fensan, xiao juju) pattern of Hui settlement throughout China constituted a distinctive territorial pattern, even if it was not a distinct territory (indeed, it was precisely the opposite); that zakat (alms) and the menhuan system of the Sufi orders of northwest China constituted a distinctive, if incomplete, economic system;²⁷ that the Hui were linguistically differed from the Han, since interspersed throughout their spoken Chinese are words from Arabic and Persian; and finally, that the Hui's "psychological make-up," while to a great extent shaped by Islam, also contains elements formed under the particular historical conditions of China.²⁸ Bai and a cohort of Hui scholars reiterated these arguments in a longer work in 1957, The History and Present Circumstances of the Huihui Nation. The authors upheld the developing/modern nation distinction but evidently still felt compelled to find "extra-Islamic" elements to supplement Hui national identity. At the same time, they continued to stress the intimate, indeed inextricable, relationship between Islam and the Hui nation.²⁹

The post-1949 theorizing did little to clarify this ambiguity. Ya Hanzhang (1916-89), a coauthor of The Huihui National Question, recalled in a 1989 essay honoring Bai Shouyi that he had been dissatisfied with the definition of Islam on which the National Question Research Association had allegedly agreed at Yan'an and suggested that the link between Islam and the development of the Huihui was still not understood.³⁰ But what exactly was the Yan'an definition of Islam?

What Is Islam?

The NQRA argued that Islam was not just a religion but rather a comprehensive social system. Liu Chun, the director of NQRA, first laid out this argument in his article "What Is Islam?," which was then included as the third of nine chapters that make up the main text of The Huihui National Question booklet. The chapter comprises three sections: (1) "The Distinctive Characteristics of Arab Society in the Age of the Emergence of Islam," (2) "The Biography of Muhammad and the Formation of Islam," and (3) "What Is Islam." It argues that Islam is a historically produced and evolving social system that, in the Chinese context, has given rise to the Hui nation.

In sections 1 and 2, Liu highlighted two aspects of Islam that bore directly on its status as something "more than" religion in the narrow sense of belief pertaining to the supernatural. First, Liu stressed that Islam's uncompromising monotheism reflected Muhammad's efforts to unite his followers politically as well as religiously. Because Islam recognizes only one true God, legitimate political authority fell only to the true God's messengers (ending with Muhammad) and their rightful successors.³¹ Thus Islam was from its inception the basis of a political community as well as a religious one. Liu then argued that although "Islamic doctrine" is religious in nature, "relatively speaking, its illusory and mystical superstitions are not so many." According to Liu, it was the profane concerns of Islam, in particular its opposition to class- and race-based oppression, that attracted early converts. Amid the inter-clan rivalries of seventh-century Arabia, adherence to Islam represented a political position more than a religious faith.³²

Liu's first and second points built to his third and most consequential claim: that "at present Islam in actuality is a social system that encompasses politics, economy, [End Page 365] law, culture, and so on, while donning the outer garb of religion." Liu based this claim on his observation that the Quran established numerous rules governing taxation and tithing, private property, inheritance, and marriage. These and other rules unified the early Muslims in a single political community.³³ In the subsequent chapter, Liu linked these "social" aspects of Islam to the national status of the Hui: "Precisely because Islam is a [set of] religious beliefs and also includes a social system as well as social mores and customs, it has been intimately related to the development of the Hui nation." The Hui were the descendants of one group of Muslims (Persians) who had come to China centuries before (during the Yuan Dynasty) and, by "adapting to the conditions of Chinese social development," became "the Hui nation."³⁴

Where did this understanding of Islam and the Hui come from? It was not based on surveys or first-hand observation of Hui life; as the aforementioned Ya Hanzhang lamented, "At the time [in Yan'an] the comrades who participated in the study of the Huihui national question were all of the Han nation, and moreover none was an adherent of Islam, and so, in truth, when it came to the national consciousness (minzu yishi) of the Huihui nation, their national feelings (minzu ganqing), and their religious belief, we did not, nor were we able to, have any firsthand understanding."³⁵

In fact, their argument originated in scholarly debates about and among Hui in the Republican period. In particular, two works by the Hui historian Jin Jitang (1908-78) provided the basis for Liu and Li's arguments: the 1935 book Studies on the History of Chinese Islam (Zhongguo huijiao shi yanjiu) and the 1936 article "On the Islamic Nation" ("Huijiao minzu shuo"). These works are not cited in The Huihui National Question, perhaps due to Jin's association with the Japanese occupation,³⁶ but their influence on the booklet is clear.

Islam in the Work of Jin Jitang

The first book-length examination of Chinese Islamic history in Chinese, Jin's Studies was principally concerned with determining the origins of the modern Hui population. Jin emphasized that Hui (Huihui) were ethnically different both from the Han Chinese and from the various other Muslim peoples found in the northwestern "Muslim borderlands" (e.g., the Uyghurs). Jin concluded that the Hui were the descendants neither of Han converts to Islam, nor the various Muslim peoples who lived under Chinese imperial rule between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Rather, Jin argued, the Hui were the descendants of the ethnically diverse Muslims who came to China during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and who, owing to their common religion, intermarried and gradually formed a distinct nation. In Jin's words,

This hodgepodge of foreigners—with different customs, habits, languages, scripts, garb, food and drink, appearances, physiques—because they had a common purpose and successively came to and resided in China, and also because they belonged to a single religion and had the same beliefs, they formed relationships of marriage and over a long period of time assimilated (with one another, not with the Chinese), reproduced, and dwelled, forming today's Hui (hui min).³⁷

To borrow Benite's synopsis of this argument, while adherence to Islam made the Hui Muslim, residence and marriage in China made them Chinese.³⁸

Jin took this argument one step further in "On the Islamic Nation," published the following year in Yu Gong, the journal of historical geography edited by the eminent historian and ethnologist Gu Jiegang (1893-1980), one of Bai Shouyi's mentors and collaborators. In that article, Jin updated his previous account, underscoring the importance of social customs and doctrine. Revising the sentence quoted in the previous paragraph, Jin now argued (revisions indicated in my italics):

This hodgepodge of foreigners—with different customs, habits, languages, scripts, garb, food and drink, appearances, physiques—because they had a common purpose and successively came to and resided in China, and also because they belonged to a single religion, had the same beliefs, and were uniform in their observance of religious tenets, and then over long period of time integrated, assimilated (with one another, not with the Chinese), reproduced, and dwelled, becoming the Hui nation (Huizu). Essentially, the Hui nation is the nation that has formed under the control of Islamic doctrine.³⁹

Note that Jin replaces "formed relations of marriage" with "were uniform in their observance of religious tenets," emphasizing the function of shared rules and social practices in the formation of the Hui nation. The latter ("religious tenets") certainly included the former ("relations of marriage") —both Jin and the Communists stressed that the requirement of intra-religious marriage contributed to the consolidation of the Hui as a distinct nation.⁴⁰ Indeed, for Jin, being Muslim entailed much more than "mere belief" (xinyang er yi) and required "strict practice of what should be practiced and prohibition of what should be prohibited."⁴¹

The importance of rules and practice to Jin's argument is even clearer in his discussion of how Islam differs [End Page 366] from other religions, which Jin asserted could not provide the basis for nationality status:

I say: Only those who believe in Islam can form a nation; other religions by contrast lack this integrative capacity. Because the lessons of Islam do not merely instruct people with murky principles, abstruse metaphysics, and a code of conduct; truly they encompass every system for organizing society, such as economics, marriage, and funerals and burials. . . . The social system of Islam alone is a distinguishing characteristic superior to other religions. Possession of this distinguishing characteristic is the overwhelming reason why those who believe in Islam can become a nation, and why those who believe in some other religion cannot become a nation.⁴²

Jin's characterization of Islamic doctrine as something more than metaphysics matches the argument Liu Chun would make in The Huihui National Question that Islam, despite being a religion, was not centered on superstitious beliefs and mystical theories. Moreover, laying the foundation for Liu's first point about Islam, that its monotheism served to politically unify believers, Jin also argued that the fact that all Muslims believed in the one "True Lord" and no others contributed to their national consciousness.⁴³ Evidently, versions of each of Liu Chun's three arguments about what makes Islam and the Hui distinctive are found in Jin's earlier scholarship.⁴⁴

Conclusion

In the CCP narrative elaborated at Yan'an and in the historiography that has developed since the establishment of the PRC, the decades leading up to 1949 were the culmination of centuries of oppression of the Hui. Long ago the social system of Islam produced the boundary that defined the Hui, who continued their development as a nation, adapting to the unique historical conditions of China. The first half of the twentieth century was simply the most recent phase in that process in which Islam played a formative—yet also fading—role.

Jin Jitang was a historian, and he understood his task to be one of excavating the history of his fellow Hui. He was also a product of his time, part of what Benite has shown to be the first generation of Hui nationalist historiography.⁴⁵ This scholarship was part of a broader "Islamic Culture Movement" (huijiao wenhua yundong) in Republican China, whose champions elaborated and popularized knowledge of Islam among Huis and Chinese society at large. Many in their ranks also sought to reform local Islamic practice, which they viewed as corrupted by superstitious, backward local customs sustained by ignorance.

They included the Islamic organizations mentioned earlier that petitioned the Nationalist government for designated representation in the National Assembly, and that also mobilized constituents to protest anti-Muslim defamation, protect Muslim cemeteries, and promote intra-Muslim marriage.⁴⁶ A detailed discussion of the periodicals, schools, associations, and activists that constituted this movement is beyond the scope of this essay. Here I want only to suggest that the notion of the Hui's strict, historic observance of the social system of Islam on which both Jin's and the NQRA's arguments hinged was not so certain in the eyes of many elites of that community. Their calls for the "revival of Islam" (huijiao fuxing) suggest that they saw such observance and the boundary it produced not as a legacy handed down generation to generation but as the aspiration of their movement and a function of their mobilization.

The assumption of a stable boundary between Hui and Han manifested in distinctive customs was in fact common to both Communist and Nationalist answers to China's "Muslim question," which was fundamentally a matter of the classification of Hui difference, not the fact of difference per se. For the CCP and the GMD, it was clear that there was some boundary between Muslims and non-Muslims in China; what was disputed was the category—national or "only" religious—into which that boundary fell. For many Hui, however, the existence of this boundary could not be taken for granted. Accentuating that boundary and institutionalizing it—in historical scholarship, in social life, in political representation-was one goal of the Islamic Culture Movement in pre-1949 China. What the CCP has cast as political liberation of a long-oppressed nation can also be seen as the consequence of the fairly recent politicization of Hui identity. [End Page 367]