Islam in China: Beijing’s Hui and Uighur Challenge

Dru C. Gladney is professor of anthropology at Pomona College, California.

Since the First World War, China has been engaged in an unremitting nationalist project that includes emancipation from its imperial past, engagement with Western political institutions, and the establishment of its sovereignty over its bounded territory. One recent challenge to this nationalist project, with roots in the early twentieth century, is a widespread separatist movement among a Muslim group known as the Uighurs, an ethnic Turkic people that inhabits China’s vast western province of Xinjiang. That the largest Muslim group in China, the Hui, have neither participated in nor been sympathetic to such a movement speaks volumes regarding the diversity of Islamic identity and practice in China. Events related to 11 September 2024 illustrate Beijing’s ongoing attempts to integrate the country’s various Muslim populations to Chinese rule.

As part of Beijing’s efforts to maintain national unity and police separatist movements at home and abroad, on 14 December 2003, China’s Ministry of Public Security for the first time released a list of four groups that it branded as terrorist organisations and eleven individuals it deemed to be terrorists. The groups were the Eastern Turkestan¹ Islamic Movement, which was identified as an international terrorist organisation by the United Nations in 2002 after prompting by China and the United States; the Eastern Turkestan Liberation Organisation; the World Uighur Youth Congress; and the Eastern Turkestan Information Centre.

The eleven individuals declared to be “Eastern Turkestan terrorists” were Hasan Mahsum, Muhanmetemin Hazret, Dolqun Isa, Abudujelili Kalakash, Abudukadir Yapuquan, Abudumijit Abduhammatkelim, Abudula Kariaji, Abulimit Turxun, Huadaberdi Haxerbik, Yasen Muhammat, and Atahan Abuduhani. The first-named, Hasan Mahsum, the reputed leader of the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, was on the list despite having been reported killed in a Pakistani raid on an al-Qaeda camp in Waziristan on 2 October 2003. On 10 November 2003, I had actually met another of the listed, Dolqun Isa, a young Uighur living in Munich, who was the elected leader of the World Uighur Youth Congress (one of the four “terrorist” organisations on the list). During the meeting he claimed that he had nothing to do with terrorism as such violence was contrary to his devout faith in Islam. He handed me a printed anti-terrorism brochure of the East Turkestan (Uighuristan) National Congress that was entitled, “Help the Uighurs to Fight Terrorism”.

These rather conflicting reports raise important questions about Islam, the state, the policing of religion, and Muslim identity politics in the People’s Republic since 11 September 2001. Are all Muslims supportive of Uighur separatism? What are the roots of Uighur separatism? Why do the Hui not support an independent Islamic state for China’s Muslims? How do these differences illustrate the “unity and diversity” of Islam in China today?

China’s Muslims are now experiencing their second millennium under Chinese rule. Many of the challenges they confront remain the same as they have been for the last thirteen hundred years of continuous interaction with Chinese society. But many others are new because of China’s transformed and increasingly globalised society, and especially because of the watershed events of 11 September and the subsequent US “war on terrorism”. Muslims in China live as minority communities amid a sea of people who, in their view, are largely pork-eating, polytheist, secularist, and “heathen” (kafir). Nevertheless, many of their small and isolated communities have survived in rather inhospitable circumstances for over a millennium.

Though small as a percentage of population (about 2 per cent in China, 1 per cent in Japan, and less than 1 per cent in Korea), the Muslim populations of East Asia are nevertheless large compared to those of Muslim-majority states elsewhere in the world. In fact, there are more Muslims living in China today than there are in Malaysia, and more than in every Middle Eastern nation except Iran, Turkey, and Egypt (and about the same number as in Iraq). Indeed, China’s primary objection to NATO involvement in Kosovo centred on its fear that this might encourage the aiding and abetting of separatists, a potential problem given that independence groups in Xinjiang, Tibet, and of course Taiwan remain a major Chinese concern. China’s Muslims are one of the largest Islamic populations in the world. I will now seek to examine Islamic identity and expression in China with special attention to the Hui and the Uighurs.

Islam in China Today

According to the reasonably accurate 2000 national census of China, the total Muslim population of the People’s Republic is 20.3 million, including: Hui (9,816,805); Uighurs (8,399,393); Kazakhs (1,250,458); Dongxiang (513,805); Kyrgyz (160,823); Salar (104,503); Tajiks (41,028); Uzbeks (14,502); Bonan (16,505); and Tatars (4,890). The Hui speak mainly Sino-Tibetan languages; Turkic-language speakers include the Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Salar and Tatars; combined Turkic–Mongolian speakers include the Dongxiang and Bonan, concentrated in Gansu’s mountainous Hexi corridor; and the Tajiks speak a variety of Indo-Persian dialects. It is important to note, however, that the Chinese census registered people by nationality, not religious affiliation, so the actual number of Muslims is still unknown, and all population figures are clearly influenced by politics in their use and interpretation. Nevertheless, there are few Han converts to Islam, and perhaps even fewer members of the ten nationalities listed above who would dare to say they are not Muslim, at least in front of their parents. Islamic identity in China can best be described as ethno-religious in that history, ethnicity, and state nationality policy have left an indelible mark on contemporary Muslim identity and it is almost impossible to discuss Islam without reference to ethnic and national identity.

Archaeological discoveries of large collections of Islamic artefacts and epigraphy suggest that the earliest Muslim communities in China were descended from Arab, Persian, Central Asian, and Mongolian Muslim merchants, militia, and officials who settled first along China’s south-east coast from the seventh to tenth centuries. Later, larger migrations to the north from Central Asia under the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries added to these Muslim populations through intermarriage with the local Chinese, the children being raised as Muslims. Practising Sunni, Hanafi Islam and residing in small settlements clustered around a central mosque, these communities consisted of relatively isolated, independent Islamic villages and urban enclaves which related to one another via trading networks. The members of these communities later came to be known as the Gedimu or traditionalist Hui Muslims. Despite their isolation, these scattered Islamic settlements shared a common feeling of belonging to the wider, global Islamic community (umma), a feeling that was validated by origin myths and folktales, and was continually reinforced by travelling Muslim teachers known locally as Ahung.

Hui Muslims

Islam in China has primarily been propagated over the last thirteen hundred years among the people now known as the Hui, but many of the issues confronting them are relevant to the Turkic and Indo-European Muslims on China’s inner-Asian frontier. Though the Hui speak a number of non-Chinese languages, most Hui are closer to Han Chinese than are other Muslim nationalities in terms of demographic proximity and cultural assimilation. In the wake of modern Islamic reform movements that have swept across China, a wide spectrum of Islamic belief and practice can now be found among those Muslims in the People’s Republic referred to as the Hui.

The Hui have been labelled the “Chinese-speaking Muslims”, “Chinese Muslims”, and most recently, as “Sino-Muslims”. However, this terminology is misleading since legally all Muslims living in China are “Chinese” by citizenship, and there are large Hui communities who speak primarily the non-Chinese languages dominant in the areas where they live. Religious membership, since the end of the last dynasty, has always been rather inflexible in China. Membership in the Muslim community is legislated by birth, in the sense that once born a Hui, always a Hui, regardless of belief or even membership in the Communist Party. The Tibetan, Mongolian, Thai (Dai zu), and Hainan Muslims of China are also classified by the state as Hui. These “Hui” Muslims speak Tibetan, Mongolian, and Thai as their first languages, together with Mandarin, China’s official spoken language that they learn in school, and the Arabic and Persian that some of them also learn at the mosque. Interestingly, since Tajik is not an official language in China, children of the Tajiks of Xinjiang (who speak a Darian-branch language distantly related to old Persian and quite different from the Tajik languages spoken in Tajikistan) are schooled in either Turkic Uighur or Mandarin. The Tajiks are the only Shi’ite Muslims in China, adhering to Ismaili Shi’ism, and are quite distinct from the majority Sunni Tajiks in neighbouring Tajikistan.

Nevertheless, it is true that most Hui are culturally more similar to the Han Chinese than are the other Muslim nationalities in China, adapting many of their Islamic practices to Han ways of life. This type of cultural assimilation has drawn sharp criticism from some Muslim reformers. In the past, such assimilation was not as greatly evident among the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tajik groups, as they were traditionally more isolated from the Han and their identities not as threatened, though this has begun to change in the last forty years. As a result of the state-sponsored nationality identification campaigns launched in the 1950s, these groups began to think of themselves more as ethnic nationalities, as something more than just “Muslims”. The Hui are unique among the fifty-six recognised nationalities in China in that they are the only one for which religion (Islam) is the sole unifying criterion of identity, even though many Hui may not actively practise Islam. Indeed, in Yang Shengmin’s 2002 ethnography of China, the Hui are included with the Han in the section dedicated to “Han-language nationalities” (Hanyu minzu).

The Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek, prior to its defeat in 1949 by Mao Zedong’s communists and its retreat to Taiwan, identified five peoples of China, dominated by the Han. Uighurs were included under the general rubric of “Hui Muslims”, which referred to all Muslim groups in China at that time. The Communist Party eventually recognised fifty-six nationalities. Uighurs and eight other Muslim groups were split out from the general category “Hui”, which henceforth was used only with reference to Muslims who primarily spoke Chinese or did not have a separate language of their own. As a policy of ethnic control, this owed much to practices that the Soviet state had applied earlier to Central Asia. It proved to be an effective means by which the Chinese communists could integrate Islam into China.

The institution most responsible for regulating and monitoring Islamic practices in China is the China Islamic Affairs Association (Zhongguo Yisilanjiao Xiehui). This association, founded in 1956 at the same time China formed the “Three-Self Organisation”, which is responsible for monitoring all Christian (Catholic and Protestant) activities, makes the final recommendations to the government regarding the establishment of new mosques, the formation of Islamic schools, and general policy regarding the legality of certain Islamic practices, such as the wearing of headscarves in public schools (banned). It plays an increasingly important role in China’s dealings with the Middle East, as well as supporting Islamic schools among the Hui.

The Uighurs

In 1997, China witnessed a spate of bomb attacks associated with the Muslim separatist cause in Xinjiang, home to the ethnic Turkic Uighurs. On 25 February that year, nine people died in a bombing in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. On 7 March, bombs exploded on two buses in Beijing, killing two people, and on 13 May, a bomb blast in a Beijing city park killed one. Though sporadically reported since the early 1980s, such incidents have been increasingly common since 1997 and are documented in several scathing reports on Chinese government policy in Xinjiang by Amnesty International.

Most Uighurs firmly believe that their ancestors were the indigenous people of the Tarim basin, which lies in what is now known as China’s “Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region”. It was not until 1760 that the Manchu Qing dynasty established China’s full and formal control over the area. Qing rule there was interrupted after a century by the Yakub Beg rebellion (1864–77) and expanding Russian influence. With the resumption of Qing rule in the region, the area became known for the first time as “Xinjiang”, the “new dominion”, in 1884.

The end of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the rise of Great Game rivalries between China, Russia, and Britain saw the region torn by competing loyalties and marked by two short-lived and drastically different bids for Uighur independence: the establishment of an “East Turkestan Republic” in the city of Kashgar in 1933, and another in the city of Yining in 1944. As Andrew Forbes has noted, these rebellions and attempts at self-rule did little to bridge competing political, religious, and regional differences among the Turkic people who had only become known as the Uighurs in 1921 under the Chinese governor, Sheng Shicai.² He was following Soviet nationality “divide-and-rule” strategies of recognising groups such as Uighurs, Uzbeks, and Kazakhs as separate Turkic nationalities. Furthermore, Justin Rudelson’s research suggests that there remains persistent regional diversity along three, and perhaps four, macro-regions of Uighuristan: the north-western Zungaria plateau, the southern Tarim basin, the south-western Pamir region, and the eastern Kumul–Turpan–Hami corridor.³

The recognition of the Uighurs as an official Chinese “nationality” (minzu) under a Soviet-influenced policy of nationality recognition contributed to the widespread acceptance today of the idea of a continuity with the ancient Uighur kingdom and that they constitute a bona fide nationality. However the designation of the Uighurs as a “nationality” masks tremendous regional and linguistic diversity. For it also includes groups such as the Loplyk and Dolans that have very little in common with the oasis-based Turkic Muslims that have come to be known as the Uighurs. At the same time, contemporary Uighur separatists look back to the brief periods of independent self-rule under Yakub Beg and the Eastern Turkestan republics, in addition to the earlier glories of the Uighur kingdoms in Turpan and Karabalghasan, as evidence of their rightful claims to the region.

The Challenge to Chinese Rule

Today, there are a number of Uighur separatist organisations, based mainly in cities outside China such as Istanbul, Ankara, Almaty, Munich, Amsterdam, Melbourne, and Washington, D.C. They may differ on their political goals and strategies for Xinjiang, but they all share a common vision of a unilinear Uighur claim on the region that has been disrupted by Chinese and Soviet intervention. The independence won by the former Soviet Central Asian republics in 1991 has done much to encourage these Uighur organisations in their hopes for an independent “East Turkestan”, even though the mainly Muslim governments of the newly independent republics all signed protocols with China in the spring of 1996 that they would not harbour or support Uighur separatist groups.

Although the Uighurs are commonly portrayed as being united around separatist or Islamist causes, they remain divided by religious conflicts (competing Sufi and non-Sufi factions), territorial loyalties (be it to oasis or place of origin), linguistic discrepancies, class hostility, and competing political affiliations. These divided loyalties were evidenced in the May 1996 attack on the Imam of the Idgah Mosque in Kashgar by other Uighurs, as well as in the assassination of at least six Uighur officials in September 2001.

It is also important to note that Islam is only one of several unifying markers of identity by which the Uighurs might distinguish themselves from other groups in China. For example, in their dealings with the Hui Muslim Chinese, the Uighurs distinguish themselves as a legitimate autochthonous minority, since both share a belief in Sunni Islam. In contrast to the nomadic Muslim peoples (Kazakhs or Kyrgyz), Uighurs might stress their attachment to the land and oases of origin. In opposition to the Han Chinese, the Uighurs will generally emphasise their long history in Xinjiang. It is this contested understanding of history that continues to influence much of the current debate over Uighur separatist and Chinese claims to the region. The multiple emphases in defining their identity have also served to mitigate the appeal that Islamic fundamentalism, such as that espoused by the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan, has had among the Uighurs.

China’s Uighur separatists are small in number, poorly equipped, loosely linked, and vastly outgunned by the People’s Liberation Army and People’s Armed Police. It is also worth noting that although sometimes disgruntled about certain rights abuses and mistreatment issues, China’s nine other official Muslim minorities do not in general support Uighur separatism. There is continued enmity between Uighurs and the Hui. Few Hui support an independent Xinjiang, and the one million Kazakhs in Xinjiang would have very little say in an independent “Uighuristan”. Local support for separatist activities, particularly in Xinjiang and other border regions, is ambivalent and ambiguous at best given the economic disparity between these regions and their foreign neighbours, including Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and especially Afghanistan: Xinjiang, even though under Chinese rule, is economically better off than these countries. Memories are strong of mass starvation and widespread destruction during the Sino-Japanese and Chinese civil wars in the first half of the twentieth century, and also of intra-Muslim and Muslim–Chinese bloody conflicts, not to mention the chaotic horrors of the Cultural Revolution. So support and desire among Uighurs for separatism is limited by fear of the possible conflict necessary to achieve an independent Xinjiang and the disruption and chaos that might ensue.

Many local activists are not calling for complete separatism or absolute independence, but generally express concern over environmental degradation, Chinese nuclear testing in Xinjiang, religious freedom, over-taxation, and recently imposed limits on childbearing. Moreover, Islamic extremism does not as yet appear to have widespread appeal, especially among urban, educated Uighurs. However, the Chinese authorities have consistently rounded up any Uighurs suspected of being “too” religious, especially those identified as Sufis or so-called Wahhabis (shorthand in the region for strictly observant Muslims, not necessarily true followers of the teachings of the eighteenth-century Arabian thinker). These periodic round-ups, detentions, and official condemnations of terrorism have not erased Uighur separatist sentiment and activity, but have forced them underground, or at least out of the public eye, and increased the possibility that Uighur Muslims may be even further alienated from mainstream Chinese society.

The history of Chinese–Muslim relations in Xinjiang has been one of relative peace and quiet, broken by enormous social and political disruptions, fostered by both internal and external crises. The relative quiet of recent years does not indicate that the ongoing problems of the region have been resolved or opposition to Chinese rule overcome. Interestingly, a recent neibu (internal circulation only) collection of articles discussing the “Xinjiang Problem” and the challenges of separatism and terrorism (with the terms often conflated) recognises that there have been no incidents since the year 2000, and blames the tensions between the Han and Uighurs in the region on the “internationalisation” (guoji hua) of the issue.⁴

The opposition to Chinese rule in Xinjiang has not reached the intensity of the separatist campaign in Chechnya or of the Palestinian intifada. Rather, it is similar to the Basque separatist campaign of ETA in Spain, or that formerly waged by the IRA in Northern Ireland. It may erupt in limited, violent moments of terror and resistance. And just as the Chechen, Basque and Palestinian crises remain unresolved, so the Uighur problem in Xinjiang does not appear to be one that will readily go away. Uighur terrorism and dissent are thus problematic for a government that wants to encourage integration and development in a region where the indigenous population is not only ethnically different from China’s Han majority, but also devoutly Muslim. How does a government integrate a strongly religious minority (be it Muslim, Tibetan, Christian, or Buddhist) into a Marxist–capitalist system? China’s policy of economic development and intolerance of dissent does not seem to have resolved this issue.

Endnotes

1. “Eastern Turkestan”, an old name for Xinjiang, is the term separatists use for their desired independent Uighur state.

2. Andrew D. W. Forbes, Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

3. Justin Jon Rudelson, Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism along China’s Silk Road (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

4. See Ma Dazheng, The State Takes Precedence: Research and Analysis on the Xinjiang Stability Problem [in Chinese] (Urumqi: Xinjiang People’s Publishing House, 2002).