CONCLUSION

DRAWING LINES BETWEEN DEVOTION AND DANHUA

On a blindingly sunny day in late March, I sat on a low stool on the side of the road surrounded by fields of goji plants, the snowcapped peaks of the Helan Shan range looming in the distance. Beside me several residents of Nanliang Village, a small farming community about fifteen miles to the north of Yinchuan, sat stripping thorns and briars from the dead branches of goji bushes. The young man seated next to me, a twenty-something who wore a bai maozi, told me about his arrival in this suburb under the administration of Yinchuan from his hometown in southern Ningxia’s overwhelmingly Hui Nanbushanqu (Southern Mountain District, comprising Guyuan Prefecture and Haiyuan County). At the age of ten he arrived at this suburban outpost with his family as part of a massive government-sponsored relocation of people from the rural south that began in the early 2000s. The entire community at Nanliang, which specialized in producing Ningxia’s signature crop of goji berries, arrived from the same mountain village. He spoke softly, continuing to snap away at the branches with the clippers as he talked. “My hometown was very poor,” he recalled. “The soil there is rocky, and it’s not good for growing crops. Most people there herd sheep.” When asked how his adopted community differed from his childhood home, he waved his hand toward the fields of bushes left bare-branched after the winter and answered, “Here, there are more opportunities. We grow goji berries and corn.”¹

The young man’s story is but one among thousands just like it. Since the 1980s China’s urban population has grown by some 500 million people. Projections estimate that by the year 2030 the urban population will swell to just over a billion. In part, economic incentive drives this mass movement of people from the underdeveloped countryside to more prosperous cities. However, government policies encouraging relocation to cities also increase the rate at which migration occurs.² Often the two forces work in tandem, as they do in the case of Hui migrants from rural communities in western China. A twenty-four-year-old Hui woman in Xining described the journey of migrants from nearby Hualong Hui Autonomous County:

Migration on this scale undoubtedly impacts social and economic life in both the rural communities from which migrants originate and the urban communities to which they relocate. Among the many consequences that this mass movement of people generates are changes in the way the boundaries of Hui ethnic identity are formed and maintained. As migration draws together Hui from different regions, class backgrounds, and degrees of education and religious piety, they contest ideas about how to define and set parameters around the content of the ethnic Hui identity. Though the state’s policies on ethnic minorities attempt to standardize Hui identity by identifying a number of cultural traits and ethnic practices the state deems acceptable, the interactions between members of various Hui communities that occur as a result of migration belie the notion of a tidy, standardized version of Hui identity. Rather, Hui from different communities express thoroughly different understandings of how Hui identity ought to be chosen, talked about, consumed, and performed. As renewal projects transform urban landscapes and in-country migration changes urban populations, Hui from different class, regional, professional, and religious backgrounds encounter one another. Rather than sharpening the ethnic boundary lines that differentiate the Hui from other groups, this contact between Hui from all walks of life heightens the salience of internal boundaries by highlighting crosscutting cleavages.

The inward focus of this debate facilitates the CCP’s management of ethnic politics. Daily interactions undertaken in the context of urbanization and migration raise the salience of nonethnic categories of identity, including class, age, gender, region, and religious sect. Highlighting the differences between groups of Hui reopens the contestation of the boundaries of Hui identity. Because such contestation turns around matters of daily habit, it occurs in informal contexts outside the purview of the state. As Hui enclave neighborhoods disperse because of urban renewal or have their demographics transformed by an influx of Hui migrants, residents contest and renegotiate which markers ought to form the boundaries of Hui identity. The intragroup contestation of Hui identity focuses attention on internal boundaries and limits contentious politics to intragroup discourse.

Where contentious politics arise from the reopening of such identity contestation, they present limited opportunities for disruption of CCP authority. Though the state’s categories and ethnicity policies provide the background against which these debates unfold, conflict rarely involves the state itself. Instead, disputes primarily involve Hui disagreeing with other Hui. The resulting debates about the most authentic form of Hui identity effectively displace tensions with the CCP and prevent widespread resistance or mobilization of opposition to the state. Anthropologist Dru Gladney refers to this manner of governance over ethnic politics, in which “people subscribe to certain identities, under highly contextualized moments of social relation” that are policed and constrained by the state, as “relational alterity.”⁴ By channeling contentious politics into intragroup debates, the CCP stands at arm’s length from conflict, and thus effectively manages ethnic politics. As Hui haggle over how to properly express their cultural identity, the CCP monitors such contestation and operates with a relatively free hand in enacting policies regarding ethnicity.

These findings point to both a strength and a weakness of authoritarian regimes. Though containing contentious politics within the community may limit the ability of Hui to mobilize in organized resistance, the state’s control remains tenuous. Attempts by the state to crack down on expressions of ethnic identity it deems undesirable may serve to increase the salience of ethnic identity and provoke greater resentment.

MIGRATION, ETHNIC BOUNDARIES, AND BELONGING

A frequently invoked maxim in the study of ethnic politics is that those who go looking for ethnicity will surely find it, imputing ethnic significance where it may not otherwise exist.⁵ In looking at the practices that respondents attribute as defining Hui identity and describing how the importance of these practices is contested, their salience varies across a number of competing identity cleavages. I eschew the notion of any single, true expression of Hui identity and stress that class, gender, region, and other identities may be equally influential in shaping an individual’s perceptions.

A tendency to prioritize ethnicity above other identities, falling back on essentialist understandings of ethnicity, reifying groups, and waving away nonethnic explanations, plagues migration studies.⁶ Indeed, methodological nationalism and the assumed framework of the nation-state privilege ethnicity in migration scholarship and discount or ignore “non-ethnic ‘pathways of incorporation’” such as class, age, gender, religion, and region.⁷ However, closer examination reveals a far more complex picture.

In the course of migration, participants endure numerous social, cultural, and political challenges that impact self-conceptions of identity. Often, the arrival of a migratory wave of people spurs sociopolitical issues surrounding questions of integration and belonging at the point of destination. Migrants’ daily experiences are thus marked by negotiations and struggles surrounding their very presence in the community. In the face of such scrutiny, migrant communities frequently strive to maintain a sense of difference from the local majority at the place of destination. Migrants’ conceptions of their own identity often rely on idealized notions of their place of origin. These notions anchor identity and allow migrants to reproduce the community at the place to which they relocate.⁸ Even if migrants share linguistic and cultural traditions with their co-ethnics at a particular location, notions of identity tied to the place of origin may prove to be overriding. Indeed, perceived closeness in cultural proximity to the majority group may influence elites in migrant groups to go to greater lengths to sustain boundaries that denote migrants’ difference.⁹

However, migration may also incentivize integration of minority groups, blurring the boundaries that separate migrants from locals. Just as a diasporic group may engage in boundary maintenance to resist boundary erasure, migration may result in redrawing of boundary lines.¹⁰ In these cases, migration may cause those who undertake it to completely reimagine how it self-identifies vis-à-vis different social hierarchies or relational contexts. These outcomes vary across contexts and reflect the ways in which migration reopens the inherently relational dynamics of identity (re)construction.¹¹ Migrant destinations become sites of constant negotiation.

In particular, contestation frequently occurs when migrants from a geographically dispersed or diaspora community arrive in communities already inhabited by a long-standing local community of co-ethnics.¹² As communities engage in these processes of contestation regional, sectarian, or social class identities may override commonly held ethnonational ones. Ethnolinguistic practices frequently become conflated with judgments about income, education, and progressiveness, and these likewise “fold into religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘purity.’”¹³ Differences in speech, degree of religious observance, or manner of dress between locals and migrants come to stand for markers of “progress” or “backwardness,” reinforcing prejudices and justifying exclusion. While these markers may continually shift and blur, they nonetheless enable processes of distancing and control.¹⁴

This politics of belonging has both formal and informal aspects, and contestation over who may be granted inclusion may just as easily occur in ordinary venues such as schools, places of worship, or neighborhood markets as it does in formal or legal institutions.¹⁵ In some cases, even the bodies of migrants become sites for contestation of identity as styles of dress and selfpresentation become markers used to draw insider/outsider boundaries.¹⁶

The condition of in-betweenness migrants occupy may be most acutely felt by children. Observations of migrant children often characterize them as “luggage” borne by their parents to new locations, making them a source of anxiety as the family attempts to preserve connections to places of origin while also integrating into the community of arrival. However, children of migrants play active, pivotal roles in the process, aiding their parents to adapt to unfamiliar local norms and institutions by attending schools, serving as translators, and making connections in the community.¹⁷ However, while ease of access to these resources makes children of migrants a bridge between their parents and the community, the discrimination they face while within local public schools and other institutions may reinforce their own feelings of otherness.¹⁸ By straddling these worlds, children of migrants paradoxically come to develop simultaneous feelings of belonging to and estrangement from their place of arrival.¹⁹ Such estrangement may also occur at their parents’ place of origin. Children of migrants often idealize such places that fail to align with the realities that meet them upon their return. Especially for those children of migrants who spent their formative years away from or grew up entirely outside of their parents’ place of origin, the place they are told to think of as “home” may feel equally alien.²⁰ Children of migrants may thus develop identities that “put into question the location of ‘home’ and ‘host’” communities or sit awkwardly between them.²¹

As a consequence, migrants may set up separate or parallel social networks to sustain a sense of identity rooted in their place of origin and cope with barriers to integration at their place of arrival. Such communities may contribute to notions of “internal ethnicity,” which subdivide the larger community into smaller ones based on region, religion, or other facets of identity. As a result, associational clusters form around these internal ethnic group identities. Entrepreneurs in these internal ethnic communities frequently privilege members of their own group in matters of hiring or may cater exclusively to members of their own group as clientele. In response to these conditions, “ethnic economies” comprised of businesses run by members of a particular ethnic group emerge to cater to group members.²²

The construction of migrant networks, practice of coping mechanisms, and debates across generational, gender, class, and other lines within the migrant community illustrate the complexity of migrant identities. Ethnicity captures only a single dimension of these realities. Better understanding of how migration impacts the lives and expression of identity of those who undertake it requires moving away from an analysis that presumes ethnicity holds a higher salience for migrants than other aspects of their identity. Examining cross-cutting cleavages presents a potential solution to the problems of overprioritizing ethnicity, analysis driven by essentialism, and the failure to account for multiplicity and variance in salience of identities. Focusing on where identities overlap or converge offers a more nuanced picture of how, when, and why ethnicity becomes salient vis-à-vis other social identities.²³

CROSS-CUTTING CLEAVAGES, MIGRATION, AND CONTESTING THE BOUNDARIES OF HUI IDENTITY

In-group heterogeneity defines urban Hui communities throughout China. Recent rural-to-urban and west-to-east migration highlights these differences by bringing Hui from different locations, classes and social settings together in the context of an urban environment. Interactions between these Hui from different backgrounds spark contestation over which markers constitute the defining features of Hui identity and make such debates public (see table C.1).

The distinctions between different groups within the Hui community illustrate an unintended consequence of urbanization: the activation of cross-cutting cleavages that result in drawing internal boundary lines. Despite all sharing the same official designation of Huizu according to China’s minzu system, arguments about matters of marriage, childbirth, speech, diet, dress, and prayer underscore the internal cleavages that divide Hui communities.

TABLE C.1. Activation of cross-cutting cleavages in Hui communities

BEIJING: THE DISPERSION AND CENTRALIZATION OF A PATCHWORK HUI COMMUNITY

As the national capital and one of China’s largest cities, Beijing attracts residents from all walks of life. Economic opportunities draw a diverse array of migrants in search of a more comfortable standard of living.²⁴ Over the past twenty years changes in Beijing’s demographics unfolded alongside largescale transformation of its urban grid. During preparation to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, Beijing undertook an extensive urban renewal program that saw the demolition and transformation of many of the central city’s hutong (narrow-lane alleys) neighborhoods.²⁵ Campaigns to transform the core of the city, both infrastructure and demographics, continue, as the city’s summer 2017 “beautification” (meihua) campaign saw the displacement of scores of residents—many of whom belong to the so-called transient population of migrants—and the demolition of numerous structures deemed illegal.²⁶

The consequences of these changes impact Beijing’s Hui community just as they do the rest of the city. Formerly, the Dongsi and Madian neighborhoods stood out as distinct Hui enclaves surrounding prominent local mosques. After urban renewal, the mosques remain but many of the former Hui residents no longer live in the neighborhood.²⁷ Demolition scattered many of them, and the neighborhoods slowly lost their Hui character. An imam at the Madian mosque explained, “Due to chai qian and gaizao [transformation], most of the Hui in the area have moved away elsewhere [banzou].”²⁸ Another respondent, a seventy-year-old retiree who was a lifelong resident of a courtyard house in a hutong in Beijing’s Dongcheng District, grumbled that many of his neighbors had been pushed out to the suburbs. “Some of them have even moved to Hebei!” he exclaimed incredulously.²⁹ The dispersal of Hui from once concentrated spaces diluted the distinctive character of the neighborhoods, leaving those who remained feeling isolated and disconnected from the community.

The changes in urban neighborhoods also drove many Hui away from their local mosques. Instead of worshiping in the neighborhood, many began to worship exclusively at the large and famous Niu Jie Mosque, while other mosques saw attendance drop. At the Dongsi Mosque in the eastern part of central Beijing, a middle-aged caretaker explained, “Before chai qian all of the buildings here were ping fang [single-story houses]. At that time many more people came to the mosque. Now, they all go to other mosques.” When asked where congregants now went to pray, he offered Niu Jie as the most prominent location.³⁰ The dispersal of these neighborhoods contributed to a centralization of Hui culture around Niu Jie. As urban renewal scattered Hui from Dongsi and Madian, the community on Niu Jie became the city’s primary remaining Hui enclave.

Even on Niu Jie the cost of living impacts the neighborhood’s character. One respondent, a transplant from Gansu who worked for the Islamic Association, remarked that the rising cost of rent in the neighborhood made it harder for Hui to afford to live there.³¹ A Han real estate agent in the neighborhood described the change: “Only a small number of [people who live here] are Hui. Before, this was Beijing’s largest Hui neighborhood. But now, there are more Han. About seventy percent of [the people who live here] are Han.”³² Chai qian not only scattered Beijing’s local Hui communities; it also brought in Hui from numerous other locations throughout China. According to several respondents, most of the Hui living in Beijing are now migrants from other places. The seventy-year-old retiree from Dongcheng bristled at the fact that his neighborhood, once a place where many Hui lived, was now home to outsiders. He ranted, “Beijing isn’t Beijing anymore! When you go out onto the street you don’t see Beijingers anymore.”³³

Niu Jie’s rise to prominence as a predominantly Muslim neighborhood also attracts Hui from all over the country. Some local Beijingers testified that many of the residents of Niu Jie’s tower apartments were outsiders (waidi ren) who came from locations as far away as Yunnan and Gansu and as close as Hebei.³⁴ Many seek out Niu Jie, hoping that the predominantly Islamic atmosphere will offer opportunities to make money. Such was the case for one Hui woman in her fifties, originally from Xinjiang, who operated a small novelties store. Locals, both Han and Hui alike, bought jade from Hotan and fruit—dried apricots and raisins—from her native Korla.³⁵ Many others in the neighborhood were, like her, recently arrived in Beijing to do business, contributing to its transient feel. While these outsider Hui infused the neighborhood with a wide range of cultural traditions from all parts of China’s Islamic community, their temporary status in the community also made Niu Jie a place of constant change.

Given the multitude of Hui that come to Niu Jie, public spaces on the street often reflect the community’s internal diversity. At times of worship, congregants from different walks of life often pray side by side.³⁶ Especially during holidays, such as the Eid al-Fitr ceremonies at the community’s famous mosque, Beijing’s Hui community displays its multifaceted composition (see figure C.1). Attendees come from all corners of China and mingle with Muslims of other ethnic groups: Uyghurs, Salars, Mongols, and others. Many foreign Muslims residing in the capital also attend. Worshippers represent China’s various Sufi orders, as evidenced by the diversity of prayer hats worn by attendees, most notably adherents of the Jahriyya (Zhehelinye) menhuan (Sufi orders local to China) with their distinctive pointed, crown-like headgear. These Hui join together to worship, and afterward many amble across the street to fill Niu Jie’s many famed qingzhen restaurants, feasting together in celebration.³⁷

Such a multicultural and diverse community, however, does not always ensure smooth adaptation to life in the city. While Beijing may provide more opportunities to earn money, many migrants drew sharp contrasts between the level of secularization they experienced in Beijing and the more traditional atmosphere of their hometown.³⁸ A thirty-three-year-old electronics salesman who moved to Beijing from Lanzhou gave a lengthy assessment of the differences he felt most clearly distinguished his hometown from the capital:

FIGURE C.1. Worshippers fill the courtyard of Beijing’s Niu Jie Mosque prior to the start of Eid al-Fitr ceremonies, July 2016.

The salesman’s view reflects the tensions that often arise between locals and migrants. While he expressed frustration with the relatively libertine attitudes of local Hui, another man, a lifetime Beijinger, commented on the severe and austere attitudes of migrants from the northwest. Many longtime Beijingers do not feel a sense of kinship or commonality with recent migrants. Indeed, respondents disagreed about the effect these migrants have on Beijing’s culture. Some suggested that Hui coming to the city from Yunnan, Gansu, Hebei, or elsewhere were too transient to make a significant impact on the community.⁴⁰ A seventy-year-old Hui author and Beijing native dismissed the idea that these migrants might significantly impact local Hui culture. “Beijing isn’t really a place that is easily influenced,” he remarked. “Mostly people are assimilated into Beijing.”⁴¹

Others see the impact of these migrants differently and frequently express concern for the loss of distinctly local customs and traditions. As migrants make up an ever-larger percentage of Beijing’s Hui population, locals complain about the slow deterioration of Beijing Hui culture. One interviewee admitted, “Beijing doesn’t really have any [local traditions]. There are very few protections here.”⁴² An imam at Madian sighed, “So many of our local traditions have already been lost.”⁴³ The seventy-year-old resident of Dongcheng bluntly stated, “In some places, like Saudi Arabia, Muslims are very devout. They teach their children to attend prayer five times a day. In Beijing, the Huihui have all been Hanified. They only know the most basic things about Islam: don’t eat pork. Besides this, they mostly don’t think [being Hui] is important.”⁴⁴ The retiree continued, explaining that younger Hui—including his own children and grandchildren—treated their ethnic identity as nothing more than a status listed on official documentation. Outside of official and formal declarations, these younger Beijing Hui rarely considered or engaged with their ethnic identity.

Transformation of both population and landscape asserts important influence on Beijing’s Hui community. In physically moving people away from traditional Hui spaces, urban renewal leads to the diminishing salience of Hui identity in many communities. In others, like Niu Jie, the concentration of Hui culture around officially promoted spaces promotes contestation over numerous intersecting identity cleavages. The influx of migrant Hui from every corner of China to Niu Jie engenders a multifaceted and inclusive Hui community. However, these exchanges also highlight regional, class, and sectarian differences across a range of daily practices.

JINAN: CLASS DIVISIONS AND RELIGIOUS REVIVAL

In Jinan, the Hui Quarter is an island of Hui surrounded by a sea of ethnicmajority Han. Yet even in this environment dividing lines cut across the Hui community. Longtime Hui residents mark the increase in migrants to the city from Gansu, Qinghai, and elsewhere in the northwest as one of the most drastic changes of the past twenty years. However, not all residents welcome the arrival of these migrants, and some single them out as different. In this sense Xibei (the northwest) becomes not just a signifier of geographic region but a category of identity that suggests income level, education level, profession, sectarian affiliation, and other matters.

As such, distinctions of class, education, and region distinguish locals from migrants. Frequently Jinanese Hui seek to demarcate their own identities from those of Xibei Hui. Jinanese Hui highlight class and education differences when drawing distinctions between themselves and migrants. One man, the owner of a small tea shop in his fifties, remarked of migrants to the community, “They come from a place like Gansu where there are also other Muslims like Salar and Dongxiang. And of course, these areas are a little less educated and a little poorer.”⁴⁵ He and others responded empathetically to these differences in class and education that separate Xibei migrants from locals, stressing the need to help these newcomers adapt to the markedly different social landscape of Jinan. Such gulfs in culture, habit, and worldview make migrants outsiders, even among fellow Hui, and make integration into the city a struggle.

Others were less kind toward migrants, some even holding prejudices against them. For instance, many viewed migrants’ relative lack of formal education and lower social status negatively. A fifty-two-year-old Hui engineer who grew up in the Jinan Hui Quarter but moved away to the suburbs stated, “I really don’t like going to the Hui Quarter. It’s not like it used to be. A lot of new people have come into the neighborhood. Probably less than half of the residents there are locals now. It just seems like the people that live there aren’t very well-educated or well-mannered.”⁴⁶ Many would agree with him that a lack of sophistication defines Jinan’s Hui Quarter, and they desire to avoid being associated with the quarter’s residents. Rather than viewing recently arrived migrants in the neighborhood as models of Islamic piety, people like the engineer look upon them as rubes from the countryside or religious fanatics. As such, they express no desire to be grouped along with migrant Hui.

The fact that many Jinan Hui remained content in being culturally Hui while overlooking religion became a major source of tension with migrants from the northwest. While numerous locals prioritized abstention from pork and self-identification as Hui on official citizenship forms as the primary markers of Hui identity, such practices as frequently attending Zhuma prayers, wearing religious attire, or sending their children to study the Qur’an during school vacations were often brushed aside in favor of economic selfadvancement. Taking off work to pray or wearing a headscarf were cited as obstacles to advancing in the workforce. Studying Arabic came at the cost of classes needed to ensure college admission. Devotion to these aspects of faith was often posed as choosing cultural and economic backwardness.

Migrants from more pious western communities expressed feelings of alienation from local Hui and displeasure at their perceived secularization and laxity. A man in his late thirties who had recently arrived from Qinghai to open a restaurant remarked, “My hometown is very small and maybe we’re not as educated as Jinan.” In contrast, however, he proclaimed, “In Qinghai there are a lot of Hui, so Jinan’s Hui culture isn’t nearly as strong as ours.” Similarly, an eighteen-year-old who had recently arrived from Qinghai to work at a lamian restaurant glumly gave his impressions of Jinan: “People here just aren’t as faithful.”⁴⁷ These migrants expressed dismay at their local Hui counterparts’ disconnect from religious roots. For these migrants, local Hui appeared lax in upholding the basic tenets of Islamic faith. An ahong at one of Jinan’s mosques summarized these complaints concisely: “Well, the Islamic tradition in the west is stronger. They start going to the mosque, studying Arabic at an early age. Some of them, in places like Ningxia, when they’re young, can speak and read Arabic but can’t even write their own names in Chinese.”⁴⁸ Responses like these repeated a common sentiment, that in the communities where migrants originated, the mosque stood as a pillar of daily social and cultural life, and thus migrants exhibited a deeper knowledge of and devotion to their faith than locals.

Local Jinanese echoed these views regarding the superiority of migrants’ religious faithfulness. One man, a factory worker in his mid-thirties, testified, “People from Xibei, they teach their children at home. I’ve seen a lot of owners of lamian shops practicing the qingzhenyan [shahada] with ten-yearold kids, or teaching their seven- or eight-year-olds how to pray.” Jinanese Hui, he claimed, rarely did the same.⁴⁹ A shopkeeper in her fifties remarked that the majority of people who showed up at prayer services on Fridays were migrants from Qinghai: “I think they’re a big influence on the neighborhood. They go to pray every Friday. Local Muslims aren’t this observant. We’re a little bit danhua [‘watered down’ or secularized]. But they regularly attend.”⁵⁰ Indeed, Hui who grew up in Jinan frequently cited their own status as danhua, especially compared to recently arrived migrants. In some this response provokes defensiveness; in others it prompts annoyance with migrants.

This devotion to the faith caused friction in the minds of some locals. A number professed that their northwestern migrant neighbors struggled to integrate into the community. In part, locals claimed, migrant families prioritized Islamic over secular education; they hinted that the children of these migrants lacked functional literacy in Chinese characters but could read the Qur’an in Arabic. Viewed in this light, the piety of the northwestern Hui becomes stigmatized as a marker of backwardness and lack of sophistication. The tea shop owner frowned on such piousness and felt unfairly judged. “This is just my opinion, but I don’t really think we should divide or separate into groups and say what we believe is right and what you believe is wrong,” he declared, adding, “I think if you eat a qingzhen diet, don’t eat pork, and believe in God, you’re doing okay.”⁵¹

XINING: RURAL MIGRANTS AND SECTARIAN DIVISIONS

While the arrival of migrants increases the salience of class and educational cleavages in cities like Jinan, in Xining migrants activate sectarian cleavages and perceived differences in level of religiosity. Several respondents boasted of the superior Islamic environment in the city. One, a taxi driver, scoffed at what he perceived as the comparative ignorance of eastern Chinese Hui regarding Islam. He emphatically boasted, “Qinghai Muslims are more devout. Muslims from the east like in Shandong don’t know anything about Islam. They smoke and drink and everything. Some of them even eat pork!”⁵² An elementary school teacher who grew up in Huangyuan, just outside the city, contrasted the religious atmosphere in Xining with other locations in China. Assessing the religious climate in Yinchuan, where he had spent some time, he remarked that he found the level of Islamic culture there wanting: “Especially in Yinchuan, people are very danhua. I say that because I went to Yinchuan, and after I arrived I could just feel it. The differences were enormous. The religious outlook there, as far we here are concerned, was maybe more danhua. If we’re using contemporary terms here, maybe they’re more modernized. But as far as we here are concerned, we’re more conservative, because in addition to developing the economy, these circumstances are still good. I have money. I have standards. These standards are more numerous in regard to religious life.”⁵³

Accounts of those who have undergone the process of migration reinforce these ideas. Some respondents based their judgments on their own experiences living and working in neidi (“interior China,” used by those in the northwest to refer to areas in the east). Others relied on accounts from family members. Still others drew on contact with neidi Hui who moved to Xining in search of new opportunities as a part of China’s Great Western Development (Xibu Dakaifa) campaign, begun in 2000. Xining locals recounted that these new arrivals from neidi struggled to adapt to the higher religious standards of Xining. Xining locals disparaged these Hui migrants as clinging to Han traditions from back east and pointed to this as evidence of their Hanification. An entrepreneur in her late thirties remarked, “There are some people who are still a little rough from a religious point of view. For instance, those Hui whose hometowns are in Hebei and Shandong, who followed their parents to Qinghai as children. Their parents’ religious faith was pretty lapsed, and so the children are also very lapsed. They all think they have to rush out and buy new clothes and a set of fireworks at Spring Festival, and things like that.”⁵⁴

Carrying on with such Han traditions earned neidi Hui scorn for engaging in ancestor veneration and other rituals deemed out of step with monotheism and Islam. By contrast, these respondents held up Xibei generally as a model and Xining as a standardbearer of Islamic devotion. They beamed with pride at the influence that Hui from Qinghai exerted when they moved into eastern communities. A high school teacher from Xunhua in his late fifities told me, “The people who live in neidi, they’re very danhua, but when people from Qinghai go to the cities to dagong [do temporary work] they start to pray more often, and believe more deeply.”⁵⁵ Another respondent, himself an ahong, noted that Muslim migrants planted the seeds of faith in long-dormant eastern Hui communities through their exemplary devotion: “[Migrants’] influence is really large. Maybe in those cities, before they arrive nobody goes to pray at the mosques, and after they arrive more people attend prayers. Or in some places there are communities where there is no mosque, and then after Qinghai Muslims arrive, the community builds a mosque.”⁵⁶ By this reasoning, pious Qinghai Hui, through their movement and their devotion, viewed themselves as providing those with tenuous connections to their Hui heritage with a template for reviving their identity.

The pride about and emphasis on Islamic observance proclaimed by Xining’s Hui illustrate the ways in which religion and religious observance provide a salient cross-cutting cleavage in Hui communities. Even though their eastern counterparts shared an ethnic identity as Hui, their insufficient devotion to Islamic practice, lax dietary standards, and insistence on observing custom regarded as Han distinguished them from locals. A visiting halal food industry consultant from Malaysia summarized this pride in religious faith concisely in his observance that Xining was, in his estimation, “the de facto Islamic capital of China.”⁵⁷ Indeed, while nearby Linxia holds deep historical and cultural significance for Hui and claims the mantle of being China’s “Little Mecca” (Xiao Maijia), the city also has a reputation for being impoverished and riven by sectarian conflict.⁵⁸ As such, some respondents in Xining looked down on the community, despite its historic roots. Commenting on their own city and drawing attention to its close relationship to the reformist Yihewani tradition, respondents proudly held up Xining as a center of Islamic modernity.

YINCHUAN: “OFFICIAL” HUI IDENTITY AND CULTURAL FUSION

As the capital of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and the seat of “official” Hui culture, Yinchuan provides an interesting counterpart to Xining, the perceived “de facto cultural capital” of Islamic China. The city spearheads much of China’s cultural outreach to the Islamic world and is home to many state-sanctioned sites of Islamic culture. However, unlike Xining, a city with a strong Islamic flavor, Yinchuan’s recent development leaves it, in many ways, in search of an identity. The Great Western Development Campaign, and the influx of migrants as a result of it, caused Yinchuan’s population to balloon in recent years. One respondent, a restaurant owner in his late thirties, explained, “We have people here from all over the country, and they’re all in contact.”⁵⁹ Another interviewee, a Han woman working in a creative design firm preparing to marry into a Hui family, recalled her experience of moving to Yinchuan. “It’s a very distinct experience,” she began. “I’m also a migrant here. My grandparents moved here because my grandfather was a soldier. My grandfather was from Shanxi, and my grandmother was from Anhui. My mother was from Hunan. Even my friends who live nearby aren’t purely from Ningxia. Most of them came from somewhere else.”⁶⁰ Indeed, very few respondents were able to trace their roots to Yinchuan beyond a generation or two, whether they were Hui migrants from rural Guyuan or Wuzhong or Han migrants from Sichuan and Zhejiang. Such disparate origins made the city a space of cultural negotiation, fusion, and adaptation.

In a space where people from so many different backgrounds interact, regional identities gain increased salience. In particular, as migrants from impoverished regions of rural Ningxia move into the city, the urban-rural cleavage within the Hui community impacts what it means to properly claim Hui identity. One woman, a Han convert to Islam working in a prayer goods store, described the impetus for Hui to leave their hometown in rural Guyuan or Haiyuan to relocate to more prosperous areas in the city:

These migrants make an immediate impact on the city. As whole villages relocate from the Nanbushanqu, they change the cultural and demographic makeup of neighborhoods. A professor noted the effects of migration on neighborhoods typically regarded as Hui enclaves: “Migrants have come in and changed how people live in neighborhoods.” He pointed to the example of the cluster of Hui businesses and restaurants near the southeastern end of the city, including the street of butcher shops and barbecue stalls surrounding the Nanguan Mosque, calling itself “Ningxia Niujie,” that had cropped up when the mosque was renovated in the late 1980s. He concluded, “As Yinchuan has gone through chengshihua [urbanization] those neighborhoods have changed.”⁶² Migrants from rural Ningxia imbued the area with a more clearly Hui aesthetic as they attempted to sell the foodstuff and handiwork of their rural hometown as branded, ethnic products.

Once arrived in Yinchuan, these Hui migrants from rural Ningxia express their distance from their urban counterparts. One man noted that the faster pace of life in the city made it difficult for rural Hui to adjust. In contrast with his home of Wuzhong, he noted, “people [in Yinchuan] are more concerned with work. It’s not like in Wuzhong, where people drink tea and chat. Wuzhong’s more relaxed.”⁶³ Without such connections city life seemed lonely and untethered to traditions. In part, respondents identified the isolating nature of city life as contributing to their feeling of alienation. An instructor at the local Qur’anic Studies Institute (Ningxia Jingxueyuan) who had moved to Yinchuan from Guyuan, described how such isolation made life difficult for recently arrived Hui from the countryside. “Here Hui are isolated from one another, and there isn’t much opportunity for communication,” he declared, adding, “Maybe in an apartment tower there might only be one or two Hui families. So people don’t communicate as much.”⁶⁴ Deprived of such resources, old practices and habits carried from the countryside faded, leaving residents feeling lost.

Along with the loss of community, many recently arrived rural Hui professed that the seemingly secular habits of their urban counterparts left them feeling out of place. Some complained that, unlike in their hometown, where almost everyone observed Islamic tradition, Yinchuan was marked by a more casual attitude about mosque attendance. The instructor at the Qur’anic Studies Institute contrasted prayer attendance in Yinchuan with his hometown: “In Guyuan religious belief is a little stronger.” As testament to this fact, he claimed, “On Fridays, it doesn’t matter whether you work in business, or you’re a teacher, or whatever job: everyone goes to the mosque to pray. Maybe ninety percent of the town will attend. But in Yinchuan maybe only forty percent attend.”⁶⁵ Another respondent noted that in rural areas, such as the nearby Hui stronghold of Tongxin County, standards of dress coincided more closely with Islamic standards for piety. She contrasted the habits of Yinchuan residents with those of Tongxin: “Yinchuan is a provincial capital, and it’s also an important city for migration. Yinchuan’s local traditions have also been influenced by customs from those who’ve migrated here from other parts of China. The changes have been significant. From our point of view, Tongxin is a pretty concentrated Hui area; it’s almost a purely Hui county. So the religious atmosphere really stands out. Especially in regard to the way people dress, it’s really different from Yinchuan.”⁶⁶

These differences in dress and diet and degree of religious observance and the lack of community lead migrants to conclude that urban Yinchuan Hui lack devotion to faith. “A lot of migrant [yimin] Muslims who come here find Yinchuan to be very danhua,” remarked an academic in the local academy of social sciences in his late fifties.⁶⁷ Such jarring differences made it hard for recently arrived residents to cope.

Furthermore, rural migrants comment that close contact with Han results in compromising basic and foundational aspects of Hui culture, including abstention from alcohol and daily prayer. A restaurant owner originally from Haiyuan County discussed the ways in which local Hui felt the need to be flexible in their beliefs in order to adapt to life in majority-Han surroundings. Citing the fact that many Yinchuan Hui found themselves surrounded by Han, he described the social pressure that many faced: “For instance, if there are three of us that are friends, and you drink, and the other two of us don’t drink, aren’t we still friends? You understand. If we two aren’t really persistent, then if five or six friends come, and they’re all non-Muslims, they might say ‘Today we’re all getting along so well, let’s hang out. But if you don’t drink, it’ll be awkward.’ If you don’t want to join in and go drink with them, then you have to be really persistent and uncompromising. I’m determined not to drink.”⁶⁸

Unlike their rural hometowns, which were overwhelmingly Hui, the new, secular, urban environs of Yinchuan presented challenges to maintaining religious and cultural practices. Working and living alongside Han meant having to learn how to maintain a Hui identity while not offending coworkers and neighbors and not limiting one’s own personal and professional opportunities. Some inevitably drifted toward secularization or competing identities associated with work. As an example, the Hui professor of history explained how secular institutions and loci of social interaction outside of the mosque contributed to the erosion of salience of Hui identity: “In the city people are more open-minded. For instance, the things people can do for amusements are more numerous, like KTV [karaoke] or going to parties. So people may not identify as Hui quite as strongly. As for me, my identity as a scholar and an intellectual is more important. My identity as Hui is perhaps less important.”⁶⁹

The differences between urban and rural identity cross-cut ethnic identity cleavages in Yinchuan’s Hui community. However, as rural migrants continue to move to the city, they increasingly exert influence on the formation of a local culture. Just as migrants feel the city’s environment influences their participation in Hui dietary, religious, and cultural practices, so too do migrants influence change in the city. As the scholar from the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences remarked, “It works both ways: [migrants] adapt to Yinchuan, but they also spur locals to think about being more [religiously] active.”⁷⁰ As a result, interactions like these between pious, rural Hui and secular Hui not only became the basis of debate but also result in the solidification of new, localized identities.

“BECOMING PART OF A NEW YINCHUAN”: CONTESTATION AND REMAKING THE BOUNDARIES OF A HUI IDENTITY

While migration may promote contact between different groups of Hui, the internal differences that emerge from such interactions may lead members of the community to reimagine Hui identity. Exposure to idiosyncratic local traditions that differ from their own may allow members of the community to extend the boundaries of the community beyond those with which they are familiar and embrace wider and more inclusive understandings of what it means to be Hui. As one retiree in Xining explained, “The faith is basically the same. All Muslims recite the qingzhen yan, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.’ We all believe this. But everywhere there are Hui we have adapted some to the local culture.”⁷¹ Many respondents observed that the act of migrating from ancestral hometowns exerted a transformative effect on the lives of migrants.⁷²

Others attested that living in urban spaces allowed migrants to become more open-minded. A university administrator in Xining argued, “The biggest change [for migrants] is freeing their minds and expanding their horizons, seeing more people. When they get to big cities, there’s a huge change in their way of thinking.”⁷³ A twenty-four-year-old woman in Xining, herself the daughter of migrants who had moved east to Zhejiang in her early childhood, echoed these sentiments and explained how a broader worldview could also impact migrants’ home communities upon their return: “Because [migrants] go out to work, they also widen their horizons, open up their worldview, meet different people. This will also make changes. Some learn new things and transform their hometowns.”⁷⁴ The university administrator noted that these changes were especially profound in regard to migrants’ conceptions of household roles and responsibilities—particularly for women. He remarked, “It makes people a bit more open-minded [kaifang]. Especially for women. They come back and they want to go out and work. Traditionally women stay at home. But after working in the east lots of women want to work.”⁷⁵ The Xining schoolteacher observed that changes in attitudes also frequently resulted in changes in daily habits and lifestyle choices. Citing changes that migrants frequently made to their attire upon returning from coastal cities, he said, “They might retain a few of their own traits from the city. For instance, habits about wearing a bai maozi, or women wearing shajin [hijab]. Maybe normally they’ll go out to get together and they won’t wear a bai maozi and instead wear Western-style clothes. Clothing and stuff like this is a pretty big change.”⁷⁶

These respondents suggested that time spent in large cities changed migrants’ relationships with their hometown—particularly those who relocated during childhood. The exposure to different lifestyles and ways of thinking most profoundly influenced the children of migrants. Many respondents noted that the children of migrants who spent much of their youth in urban environments adopted habits from their urban counterparts. One imam remarked, “Yes, there are very clearly differences. For instance, the way young people dress. Muslims aren’t supposed to wear short sleeves and women aren’t supposed to show their hair. But you see lots of people these days that wear short sleeves and low-cut shirts and show their hair.”⁷⁷ Lifestyle habits like these choices in dress make the children who return from living away stand out as distinct from those grew up in rural areas. Further, this estrangement leads to a sense of in-betweeness, neither belonging to the cities in which they largely came of age or the rural communities to which they have returned. Traits developed outside of their place of origin mark them as semi-outsiders.

Among the most prominent of these traits is language. Rather than speaking the local dialect of their parents’ village, these children grow up in environments where standard Chinese (Putonghua) is the most frequently spoken language. Respondents noted that these children lose many of the expressions and speech patterns of the village. In the case of Hui communities, children may no longer speak Huihua or use the Islamic terms derived from Persian or Arabic that punctuate their parents’ speech. As a fifty-three-year-old professor who originally grew up in Xunhua stated, “[Migrants’] children also see so much more of the world. At the very least, their Chinese is standard.”⁷⁸ Living in an urban environment also offers the children of migrants opportunities they might not otherwise have in the countryside. In particular, children’s chances to receive quality education greatly increases. One Hui woman in Xining, a professor of sociology at a local university, observed, “Naturally, [migrants] greatly influence their own families. I think the thing they bring back is their influence on changes in their children’s education.”⁷⁹ Though greater education and more standard speech may open doors for these migrants, it may also arouse resentments about social class in their community upon return. Losing ethnic markers in speech or vocabulary may cause them to be seen as out of touch with Hui culture.

This place of in-betweeness generates new identities for children of migrants. Influenced both by the traditions of their parents’ hometown and also by their interactions with others during their time away, these children may develop new understandings of how to model and engage with Hui identity. A respondent who managed his father’s restaurants remarked that the children of migrant families were forging a new set of local traditions. To him, the interactions between these new generations of Yinchuan residents was responsible for forging “a New Yinchuan.” Speaking of the impact of migrants on Yinchuan’s overall cultural landscape, he mused, “There isn’t really an inherent influence of migrants. Maybe these people’s children, the next generation, they can become residents of a New Yinchuan. This includes residents of Old Yinchuan’s children’s children also becoming a part of New Yinchuan. Maybe it could be like that.”⁸⁰ The idea of developing a “new” understanding of Yinchuanese or Hui identity speaks to the impact that internal migration exerts on cultural contestation. A high degree of mobility—both geographic and socioeconomic—among Hui opens new windows for exploring the content of Huiness. The children of migrants who grow up in these environments forge new boundary markers of Hui identity and form new understandings about the essential core of Hui identity.

MULTIPLE WAYS TO BE HUI: CROSS-CUTTING CLEAVAGES AND INTERNAL BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY

In each of these communities—Beijing, Jinan, Xining, and Yinchuan—migration activates cross-cutting cleavages as Hui from different class, educational, regional, and religious backgrounds interact. The salience of these cross-cutting cleavages frequently overrides the encompassing ethnic identity of Hui and draws internal boundaries within the Hui community, making distinctions like bendi (local) and waidi (outsider), xibei and dongbu (eastern Chinese), or qiancheng (pious) and danhua subcategories into which Hui group themselves. When discussing which practices and traits established the boundaries of Hui identity, respondents seemed more eager to assert how their practices set them apart from—and in many cases marked them as superior to—others claiming Hui identity. Boundary-setting processes are inherently reflexive, and identifying which characteristics, traits, and practices make up an “us” requires a “them” for contrast. Over the course of my fieldwork, the more frequently evoked “them” in relation to discussion about Hui identity was not the majority Han but rather others seen as being differently—and perhaps improperly—Hui.

Examining internal divisions like these also illustrates various social challenges that arise in the context of migration. Renewed contestation of identity boundaries and the increased salience of internal boundary lines present challenges. The process of migration reveals many of these obstacles that both migrants and locals must face. As contestation reopens debates over which practices should stand as markers of group identity, migrants in particular may struggle to adapt to the differences between their place of origin and their current location. The feeling of disorientation may only intensify if those drawing contrasts are supposed co-ethnics.

EATING BITTERNESS: MIGRATION, ETHNICITY, AND SOCIAL CHALLENGES IN HUI COMMUNITIES

I sat at the table in the hotpot restaurant on the eighth floor of Yinchuan’s Muslim Hotel (Ningxia Musilin Fandian), wisps of steam rising up from the ceramic pot filled with bubbling broth laced with chili oil, listening to my respondent, a middle-aged former imam currently working as the operator of a small electronics shop. He was extolling what he counted as the virtues of the Hui. “We Hui aren’t very lazy,” he began. Immediately he contrasted the Hui to other minorities, high-handedly declaring, “It’s not like those Kazakhs and Uyghurs from Xinjiang who’re so lazy. Hui are really able to chiku [to undergo hardship, literally translated as ‘eat bitterness’].”⁸¹ He attributed this superior fortitude to the cleverness and ingenuity of Hui people. His confident boasts resembled many remarks I heard throughout my time in the field: unlike other minzu, Hui succeeded wherever they went, thanks to their adaptability. My respondent’s invocation of the success of the Hui in adjusting to new surroundings and finding ways to integrate highlights the heterogeneity of Hui communities. His belief in the ability of his fellow Hui to overcome struggles disregarded the real and substantial obstacles that Hui migrants face.

Internal boundaries within Hui communities contribute to a number of these social, economic, and cultural challenges. While many respondents in Xining affirmed that leaving rural Qinghai provided migrants with better work opportunities and the ability to improve their quality of living, many also remarked that cultural chasms between urban and rural life made it difficult for migrants to adjust to life in cities.⁸² One merchant selling yak butter in Xining described the cultural barriers that migrants confronted in eastern cities: “[Migrants] make a lot more money. Most people who make lamian come from Hualong County or Xunhua County. Most of them are farmers, but they go open restaurants in the east and they can earn a lot. When they come back they can afford a nice house in Xining, or a new car. It’s made their lives a lot more comfortable. But they still lack suzhi.”⁸³ Remarks like these point to an acute dilemma facing migrants: even after improving their economic circumstances, they face challenges fitting in. These educational and lifestyle obstacles also make integration into urban environments difficult. A Han professor in Yinchuan remarked of migrants from rural parts of Ningxia, “They’re still integrating.” She elaborated, “They still face some discrimination. They are not as educated or economically well off.”⁸⁴

These difficulties most profoundly affect the children of migrants, who grow up trapped between cultural spheres. Many respondents noted that the children of migrants spend the formative part of their youth living in large urban centers where they are stigmatized as different from local children. Then, upon returning to their parent’s hometown, they experience similar feelings of distance. The twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher from Xining explained the difficulties that children who leave Xibei face upon their return: “The kids have some problems fitting in, because they’ve lived in Beijing or Shanghai for such a long time. The kids live there from when they’re born until maybe they’re seven or eight years old, maybe even into their teens. They go to school there. These kids return to Xining, and after they stay for a month or so, they just don’t fit in. They want to go back, and they’ll say ‘I don’t want to live here, let’s go back home.’ This is a big influence on the next generation.”⁸⁵ Another respondent, a professor at a Xining university, connected the experiences of these children who grow up in eastern cities to a decline in religious observance: “[The children] grow up in cities and they don’t want to be farmers. They want to come back and live in the city. This has some influence on faith. Their family has faith, but they grow up in areas that don’t have strong faith. So, it’s more difficult to maintain.”⁸⁶ Such a decline in religiosity and an embrace of secularism may strike those remaining in their place of origin as an abandonment of not just Islam, but of Huiness as well.

Upon their arrival in larger cities like Jinan or Yinchuan, rural northwestern migrants struggle to adjust to social environments with different cultural practices and different standards for religiosity and piety than the hometown they left behind. Habits that might be ordinary in the context of their hometown may breach norms of appropriateness in the city. For instance, in November 2015 Jinan Capital City Television’s leading nightly news and entertainment program, Dushi Xinnübao, reported that the public butchering of sheep on a street corner in a manner consistent with halal standards (wherein the animal is slaughtered by slitting its throat and draining all of the blood out of the meat) caused a stir because it frightened kindergarteners at a nearby school. The report, which did not specify the ethnicity of the vendors but heavily implied they were Hui, raised questions about the sanitary quality of the meat, as well as the emotional damage such events may have caused children who witnessed it.⁸⁷ While this process of slaughtering animals in a manner consistent with the dictates of Islamic law might be in keeping with normal practice in predominantly Islamic communities, in the overwhelmingly Han environment of Jinan such a practice might garner negative attention. Gulfs of understanding like these make it difficult for migrants to sustain the practices of daily life they bring with them from their place of origin and also prevent them from feeling fully integrated into their place of arrival.

Differences in cultural practices not only pervade interactions between locals and migrants but also color the interactions of migrants with social and administrative institutions. Such difficulties are particularly evident in cities like Jinan, where these institutions differ significantly from those in the communities that migrants leave behind. One imam in Jinan remarked that northwestern migrant Hui often have trouble adjusting to the cultural habits of the city and depend upon the mosque to help them learn how to settle in and integrate. Among other difficulties, he notes, migrants from the northwest are unfamiliar with local governance and administrative systems and therefore look to the mosque rather than the state to settle social and business disputes.⁸⁸ The factory worker in Jinan described the motivations that necessitate this intervention:

Discrepancies like these make matters of service provision and dispute resolution difficult and reinforce migrants’ feelings of alienation from the local community. They also reinforce preconceived prejudices about migrants’ lack of sophistication or cultural backwardness. The administrative and interpersonal headaches created by such situations grow even larger when they occur between migrant Hui and local Han.

Difficulties in adjusting to the societal conventions and differing means of overcoming obstacles and resolving problems like those described by Jinan residents illustrate how differences in profession, region, and religious and class background divide Hui who claim a common ethnic identity. As migration draws disparate groups of Hui together in close contact in urban spaces cross-cutting cleavages grow in significance and become more readily apparent. As a result, urban spaces become the sites of renewed contestation of the boundaries of Hui identity.

CONTESTING HUI IDENTITY UNDER AUTHORITARIANISM

Observing the internally contentious politics brought on by migration and urban renewal within Hui communities yields several valuable theoretical insights. The Hui case presents opportunities for further development of theories about the role played by everyday practices in setting and maintaining boundaries of identity. Beyond this, the setting of these observations in the context of an autocratic state illuminates many of the mechanisms of authoritarian governance that stabilize and sustain regimes. Contestation within the Hui community over which practices should mark the boundaries of Hui identity illustrates the CCP’s authoritarian management strategies in practice and provides important lessons about the nature of authoritarian legitimation and governance strategies.

The character of ethnic politics depends heavily on state capacity and the institutional dynamics set up by the state.⁹⁰ The conduct of ethnic politics unfolds as a dialectical process between the state and the people. The state’s ability to shape this process depends heavily upon its capacity and the institutional dynamics it has created. Authoritarian strategies for conducting ethnic politics seek to centralize the authority of the state and limit avenues for wider societal participation to fit within “ill-defined” but predictable limits.⁹¹ Authoritarian regimes consider ethnic politics a “red line” that must not be breached by dissenters, as doing so would threaten the ability to maintain the state’s territorial integrity and national cohesion.⁹² Successful management of ethnic politics by the state also presents autocracies with important opportunities to validate regime control. Occasionally, authoritarian regimes find utility in exploiting contentious ethnic politics to establish political order.⁹³

Demobilization allows regimes to stop opposing voices from articulating alternative formulations of policy or governance.⁹⁴ Autocrats often achieve such suppression by stifling preconditions for collective action.⁹⁵ Using an indirect means of disrupting the method, timing, or resources available to dissenters may prove more effective and less costly to the state. Unobservable suppression tactics may even be carried out by nonstate actors.⁹⁶ Though harder to track, these tactics are no less effective in securing demobilization, as effective implementation of channeling by the state results in quieter, less threatening forms of protest.⁹⁷

Viewed through the lens of authoritarian management, the CCP’s ethnic policies—such as exemption from family-planning policy, preferential bonuses on college entrance examinations, housing subsidies for minorities, and the imposition of patriotic education classes in minority areas—may be seen as effective means of channeling China’s ethnic politics to diffuse conflict between ethnic minorities and the state. The current CCP shows an overarching concern for the maintenance of regime-preserving stability.⁹⁸ Ensuring stable ethnic politics is therefore a core concern tied to the overall program of stability maintenance.⁹⁹ However, the “ethnic revival” of the Reform era poses many challenges to CCP leadership. The resulting “minority culture fever” (wenhua re) that accompanied the revival of state support for minority identification allowed for ethnic minorities to reestablish cultural institutions and develop a collective identity “outside the Han-centric mainstream.” Construction of these institutions poses an acute threat to the CCP’s structure of control. While a rise in ethnic secessionism spurred on by an increase in the salience of ethnic identity would perhaps threaten the territorial integrity of the PRC as constructed under CCP leadership, the threat such a movement might pose to the “on-going, Han-centric project of national identity construction” would pose a far thornier problem. Understanding these stakes, the regime attempts to highlight ethnic diversity and engage in cultural preservation in “forms of citizenship practice.”¹⁰⁰

In harnessing the enthusiasm for cultural differentiation, the CCP encourages citizens to buy in to becoming officially ethnic in a system that sets clear boundaries of appropriateness for ethnic politics, prevents disruptive contentious politics from targeting the institutions of the state, and ensures the CCP’s continued ability to maintain control without resorting to outright repression.

In practice, the CCP uses development as a means of channeling ethnic politics into safe spaces for the regime, often by shifting the focus of contentious politics toward internal cleavages.¹⁰¹ In this way, it implements suppression while avoiding use of violent force. James Leibold argues that although resistance in Tibet and Xinjiang provides a notable exception in which the regime’s ability to exert control fails, the overall picture of China’s ethnic politics “does not necessarily reflect patterns of communal conflict and violence” and thus stands as a “tenuous success” in channeling and demobilizing instability. Though Leibold’s shaky equilibrium suggests fragility in the CCP’s control, he argues that by (1) enhancing quality of life and ethnic consciousness, (2) enacting de facto ethnic-based segregation, and (3) promoting policies that create economic and spatial marginality for ethnic minorities, the regime successfully manages ethnicity.¹⁰²

The CCP’s mixture of providing economic incentives for minority participation in the state, constantly promoting messaging about ethnic unity, and stressing the Party’s central role in providing a stable environment for the prosperity of all Zhonghua minzu reduces points of friction between minorities and the state. In so doing, the CCP ensures that its ethnic categories become a normal part of life. Debates about ethnicity that highlight class stratification, regional differences, or generational divides within the community draw conflict away from the regime and ensure that contentious politics turn around in-group arguments. The regime’s control simply becomes the background against which these intragroup discussions take place. As Leibold asserts, “Managed diversity is the norm in China today.”¹⁰³ Although built on tenuous foundations, the CCP’s suppression tactics continue to prove effective. While the success of the CCP’s channeling strategy rests on a fragile balance that requires precision to maintain, barring a seismic shift in China’s sociopolitical or economic landscape the Party’s practice of using internal divisions to exert indirect control remains tenable.¹⁰⁴

The observations made over the course of my fieldwork in Hui communities provide further illustration of the CCP’s attempts to channel ethnic politics in practice. The minzu system’s state-sanctioned articulation of Hui identity provides a background against which the Hui community engages in the renegotiation of Hui identity through daily, informal interactions. Everyday habits and ordinary practice become the subjects of debate about what should be considered essential markers of Hui identity instead of the appropriateness, fairness, or representativeness of the CCP’s ethnic policies.

These processes of contestation increase the salience of internal differences within Hui identity. Cross-cutting class, educational, or regional cleavages may lead Hui from different backgrounds to differ about forming a proper definition of qingzhen, determining whether Hui must wear religious head coverings, or choosing whether their children should learn Arabic. Expressions of Huiness range from secularized to religiously orthodox and from assimilationist to segregationist. Further, Hui residents often seek arbitration on these matters from figures outside of the state apparatus. Rather than forging a single Hui identity to allow “permissible displays of difference,” migration may forge new understandings of the content of Hui identity that may not square with the formalized, state-sanctioned conceptions. But instead of resisting the state’s established criteria, contestation over these matters unfold within the community itself. The state’s program of economic incentivization, provision of resources for social and geographic mobility, and rhetorical promotion of the Hui as an equal and valuable contributor to the Chinese state reduce opportunities for conflict with the CCP.

This proliferation of conceptions of Hui identity does not weaken the state’s ability to exert control, yet the CCP’s control remains only tenuous. If the state persists in using heavy-handed tactics to suppress unauthorized or unwanted expressions of ethnic culture, it risks returning the focus to the external boundaries between Hui and non-Hui. Overregulation of ethnic identity focuses politics on state definitions or official measures. In so doing, the state provides opportunities for ethnic identity to become a vehicle for social mobilization and opposition. Stringent policing of ethnic practices may serve to flatten internal differences and raise the salience of ethnic identity above that of competing, cross-cutting identities. If the state attempts to quash any unwelcome displays of ethnic identity, it risks solidifying the common bonds of Hui identity and provoking a backlash that will hinder the CCP’s objectives.