Book Reviews
Although there are studies of the Muslims in China, this is the first comprehensive book to attempt to come to grips in detail with a specific community. This book has a particular target – to portray the history of China’s Hui Muslims – and a general one – the treatment of self-seeking minorities in Chinese politics. The present in-depth study unfolds the evolutionary change in the Hui social, economic and political system, whose leaders have apparently chosen to tread a ‘compromised path’ between the strict atheist atmosphere of Communist China and demands of their identity, culture, language and above all their religion in order to keep an ancient way of life alive.
Against the background of a carefully laid benchmark and thorough survey, imbued with great sensitivity, the study clearly offers profiles of the scale, directions and processes of change in the structural and behavioural patterns, and projects the Hui identity in the midst of great political upheavals in Chinese politics throughout the past several hundred years. Michael Dillon has also probed into the responses of the Huis as distinct minority community in its interaction with the majority Hans. However, the most interesting import to this observation is the ideological changes that the new generation of Huis have imbibed and the way they envisage their future.
In recent years, unlike their Uighur or Ustat (Hainan) Muslim counterparts, Huis have encountered very little hostility in their interaction with the overwhelming Han Chinese. Dillon’s study provides three specific explanations to validate the argument. First, although Huis constitute an officially designated nationality (minzu) category, they are scattered over a vast area in China’s north-west and lack effective political mobilisation. Secondly, their relative isolation has prevented radical Islamism from making inroads into their daily lives. Thirdly, since they share a great many Chinese cultural and other attributes they are better assimilated with mainstream life than Tibetan Buddhists or Uighur Muslims.
Collectively these factors have also been responsible for the Hui being an under-researched community in China. Or, as Dillon puts it, although the Hui live throughout the whole of China, ‘there is very little understanding among non-Hui citizens of the country of who they are or why they display certain attributes’ (p. xvii). This ignorance, however, is not mutual. While there is very little knowledge among majority Hans to distinguish the ethnic difference between Han and Hui and the related assumption that Huis are indeed Chinese, who at one point in the past simply converted to Islam, the Huis are fiercely conscious of their autonomous religio-cultural identity inherited through oral history. The question that emerges here is: could the Chinese state be behind the construction of greater Han–Hui solidarity as part of an old and deliberate but hidden project of assimilation? It appears that within China itself there is an overwhelming impression that Han–Hui interaction is a permanent affair.
Dillon, however, is sceptical about a long-term truce between the two. He suggests that, in spite of the degree of commonality and the loyalty displayed by Hui toward the Chinese state, one cannot altogether dismiss the rise of autonomous Hui nationalism in future. Given the fact that Hui insurrections in the 1860s and 1930s were in part against Han Chinese domination, it would be wishful thinking to suggest perpetual peace between both (p. 179).
This apprehension of Dillon is explored in detail in the last chapter. In this section, he provides a comprehensive account of the trials and travails of Huis, during the Cultural Revolution and up until the death of China’s supreme leader Chairman Mao. Dillon also recounts how the post-Mao leadership has slowly recognised some of the religio-cultural aspirations of Huis.
Limited reconciliation effort with Muslims (in terms of opening of mosques, distribution of the Qur’an and issuing of permits for pilgrimage to Mecca) has been undertaken by the Chinese state to facilitate greater trade and investment potential with Islamic republics of Central Asia. Yet Dillon argues that the rise of radical Islam in Central Asia is slowly filtering into China and could eventually mobilise Muslims throughout the country and prepare them to demand greater recognition of their rights and perhaps independence.
This book has both strengths and weaknesses. But its outstanding feature is a great strength: namely that it collects an enormous range of reliable information and insight about a major community from a wide range of local and Chinese sources. Yet excessive inclusion of details occasionally gives the book the appearance of a Lonely Planet title. There are some typographical errors, the most obvious being in page 184, in which French Jesuit priest Jean Domenge’s date of birth is cited as 1166 instead of 1666.
