China's Muslims

Attempt 3 to post!

Thanks to Programmer Craig's comment to a previous post, I was pressed to do a little research on Muslims in China. In the past, I'd been curious about Sino-Arabic/Muslim relations, but hadn't done much research on the subject until tonight.

I remember that when I lived in Libya, there was a movement of young men going to China to buy products to sell in Libya. I believe this is called suit-case trade and, aside from the alure of inexpensive Chinese products, is one of the black markets created under both sanctions and Libya's previously tightly controlled economic policies. I also remember the suit-case merchants saying that all they could eat was tuna because they were disgusted with Chinese food...a statement which confused me quite a bit. Who doesn't like Chinese food?

Flipansy aside, I also know that about two years ago, the League of Arab States indicated that they were beginning to look eastward. This is expected given that economic trends are moving east, especially as the petrolium trade is concerned. However, I'd always looked at it from an international relations point of view, as an outsider considering state relations without looking into the internal linkages.

So I thank PC for leading me to look into this further because I've discovered quite a few interesting facts about the internal linkages of in terms of the Chinese Muslim (or Muslim Chinese) population and status.

First off, apparently Islam reached China in the 7th century BC. And while China's infamous Cultural Revolution and its anti-religion policies lead most of us to believe that religious identities are likely to be obsolete in China, China technically liberalized religiously (usually an oxy-moron) in 1978.

Never mainstream

"Historically, Islam has been in China since the Tang Dynasty (618-907CE) but it was never mainstream. There was never a Muslim emperor and Confucian thought was the dominant cultural force," Feng Jinyuan, an Islamic specialist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said.

Jonathon Lipman, author of several works on China's Muslims, says: "Conversions to Islam have been few and far between." In part this appears to be because when people are looking for religion, they are looking for wider cultural associations.

The provinces of western China where Islam is prevalent also happen to be the nation's poorest, while Christianity, which is now being practised in various forms by a wide range of social classes, is linked to the West.

"At present Christianity is far more appealing because of its association with modernity, Europe and America," says Lipman.

According to the New York Times February 19, 2006 article, Chinese Muslims number at 21 million—that’s about 1.6% of a 1.3 billion population—approximately the number of Europe’s Muslim population and comparable to Iraq’s entire population. And they have their own internal fighting, though the offensive of the cartoons found a common factor:

Dru C. Gladney, a leading Western scholar on Chinese Muslims, said the country's 10 Muslim nationalities usually find common cause only when they feel an issue denigrates Islam, as was the case with the cartoons. Sometimes, disputes between different factions can end in violence. Mr. Gladney said the largest group, the Hui, regard some Uighurs as unpatriotic separatists who give other Chinese Muslims a bad name. The Hui, he said, have blended fairly well into society by placing pragmatism over religious zeal and adopting the low profile of an immigrant group living in a foreign land — despite their presence in China for more than 1,300 years.

While they are marginalized as well as other ideologies that compete with the government’s, they do seem to make themselves heard. This is most likely helped in part by the Chinese government’s formal recognition of Islam as a major religion in China:

"They don't tend to get too involved in international Islamic conflict," said Mr. Gladney, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii. "They don't want to be branded as radical Muslims."

Yet Chinese Muslims should not be considered completely housebroken by authoritarian rule. Since the seventh century, when Islam began arriving in China along trading routes, there have been periodic Muslim revolts. Under the Communist Party, Muslim rage, if mostly contained on international issues, has erupted over localized affronts.

Large protests broke out in 1989. Muslims took to the streets to denounce a book that described minarets as phallic symbols and compared pilgrimages to Mecca with orgies. Government officials, who allowed the protests, quickly banned the book and even held a book burning.

A few years ago, thousands of Muslims protested in various cities after a pig's head was nailed to the door of a mosque in Henan Province. And last year, riots erupted after Hui from all over central China rushed to the aid of a Muslim involved in a traffic dispute.

Final analysis is this so far:
Yes, Muslims do exist in China—a whole lot of ‘em too. They are an extreme minority and politically marginalized as would be expected under any super centralized regime. According to one of the articles (I tried to look for which but am worried that my computer will shut down again—I can find it again in the future), there have been more Chinese Muslims going to the mosque than prior to 9/11. There is definitely a reaching out to Middle Eastern Muslims by Chinese Muslims, a trend which I believe will be interesting in the future.

Economic trends lead eastward as Asian nations industrialize (have industrialized and continue to do so) and make up more of the petroleum consuming market. If economic power is as fungible as it has proved to be in the past, then it seems important to me, as one interested in Middle Eastern politics, to pay attention to a region that is already a major player and will likely grow. Petroleum producing nations gained power in the last 50 years due to the west’s industrial needs and were influenced by western ideals as a result of such tight relations. So what now? What direction will this take us?