Crash of ethnicity

In this section I will illuminate how particular events are gathered to become evidence for reinforcing a collective characteristic or cultural trait of a people, thus a legitimizing rhetoric for ethnic division and boundary-making.Footnote ²

I shall first share a response to a post (Fig. 1) found online, with the caveat that similar posts are no longer seen as the Chinese internet environment has become intolerant of ethnic discrimination:

Figure 1.

“What can we do when encountering unreasonable Hui people?”

This paragraph is in response to a question: “What can we do when encountering unreasonable (bu jiangli 不讲理) Hui people?” posted on a website called “Baidu,” one of the most used Chinese search engines. The question was not about an ethnic conflict per se; rather, it began when the original poster's uncle was involved in a traffic accident when the uncle crashed into a Hui person who happened to pass by. When the two parties attempted to negotiate a compensation, the uncle claimed a lower one. Consequently, he was beaten up by the Hui man's friends. What is interesting is that, although the ethnicity of people involved in the traffic accident does nothing to explain the situation, ethnicity is singled out right away in the cited post. The poster and responder following the post both tried to explain the conflict by referring to not the individuals involved, but a naturalized Hui trait as being “unreasonable” or violent.

The response to the post is but another reiteration of an old stereotype. Notice that the person who responded, rather than answering the question of the poster regarding the traffic accident tussle, vastly expanded his/her response into an occasion to list several “Hui Rebellions” or ethnic conflicts of unofficial and even suspicious resources. Hui people's violent struggles were arbitrarily labeled as “rebellions” or simplified as “conflicts” with no mention of profound societal and historical reasons of the violent events.Footnote ⁴ Although class struggle, social justice, financial well-being etc. are other issues that may dominate critical or celebratory narratives about specific rebellions as well, when ethnicity is involved, however, the events are suddenly all about ethnicity. Besides, whenever a conflict happens, the Hui are always the presumed bullies, without mentioning any Hui loss in these conflicts.

The all-about-ethnicity attitude, no matter in a street tussle or large scale conflict, “would claim the entire edifice of ‘Our Culture’ and ‘Our Nation’ for themselves” (Narayan Reference Narayan1997, p. 10), by an implication that no space is left at all for the minorities who also share the living space with the majority. Allan Pred's analysis on immigrants in Sweden is useful for understanding this response too:

In the traffic incident, violence as a stereotype is instrumentalized; it allows the responder to draw an ethnic boundary, which is at the same time a moral line between the imagined us and them. The act of generalization is the process of creating a “collective individual” (Handler and Linnekin Reference Handler and Linnekin1984, p. 277) or rather, two collective individuals, one is named as Han, the other, Hui. No matter what the term Hui means in the mind of whoever is applying it, it is there. Violent becomes a tag, a naturalized identity shared by all Hui people.

In traffic accidents physical conflict between two sides are normally perceived as one on one interaction. Nonetheless, the one mentioned above between a Hui and a Han was no longer a normal accident involving just individuals, but became a contact zone of two imagined ethnic groups. Once the interaction in this particular contact zone is marked by violence, an individual's behavior will soon be absorbed into collective images of a whole people, to support self-reinforcing stereotypes.

Of course, the Han, China's ethnic majority, are not the only ones using narratives about interethnic physical conflicts to highlight ethnic boundaries. In the following section I shall share some modified versions of violence found in Hui people's own narratives, which, similar to the online post just shared, also comment on street fights between Hui and Han people. My data are obtained from both fieldwork and secondary resources.

Martial arts and solidarity

In this section the main focus will still be violence in daily interethnic interactions, with the narrators now switched to Hui. Although ethnic boundaries are still being highlighted, the ideas used to instantiate violence have changed, here to include more positive concepts such as martial spirit and ethnic solidarity.

Hui are famous for practicing martial arts, in Chinese wushu 武术. Gladney observed that Hui people “look up to famous wushu artists that took part in ‘righteous uprisings’ (qiyi) against oppressive regimes” (Gladney Reference Gladney1991, p. 198). Indeed, I have seen equipment for martial arts and bodybuilding in almost all the mosques I visited during my fieldwork in Shandong Province. However, unlike in Gladney's documentation, in everyday life martial arts are more practiced in gray areas but not for fighting upward: those who fought against oppressive regimes are not the only ones to be remembered, the one who skillfully employs martial arts in a not so decent street fight could likewise become a hero.

I am citing a narrative here: “With them [the Han] there was only one fight, twenty eight of them were thrown in the river. Huang Chengxi, a famous one, one of the ‘Four Quick Wrestlers’ …”Footnote ⁵ This is a piece of narrative collected from an old mosque member, the late Mr. Y in Jinan, Shandong Province in 2011. Apparently the wrestler Huang has become a legend in aged Hui people's memory about street life in Jinan, and his practicing of martial arts has been bonded with his fight. More accurately, opportunities for street fighting have become a reason for practicing martial arts. As Mr. Y later remarked: “Normally all the [Hui] kids should practice [wrestling], so they are prepared [for the street], and won't get bullied (bu chi kui 不吃亏) out there.” We can clearly see the tension between Hui people and the world “out there” sensed by Mr. Y. The only way to avoid being bullied is to become good at practicing violence, to be “prepared.”

Similarly celebrated in this kind of narratives is ethnic solidarity, or “tuan jie (团结)” in Chinese. Just as the online response shared in the previous section about how Hui from all over the country would come together to fight against Han, Hui themselves also refer to this sort of activities. This mobilization of co-ethnics is however positively re-instantiated as ethnic solidarity. During my fieldwork, I many times heard about the comment that the Hui were “tuan jie” in fighting against Han. In his analysis of “East Street Guo,” a Hui family in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, Gladney also stated that the Guo took “solidarity” as their ethnic characteristic, and the very instance they highlighted as an evidence of this solidarity was to “hit people” together, to fight against threats from outside the community (Reference Gladney1991, p. 313).

Unlike in the online post shared above, the Hui are no longer bullies in these narratives. Violence becomes a method to protect oneself from the bullies out there. Hui's violence is rendered positive, celebrated as martial spirit and ethnic solidarity. But not unlike in the online response, the positive renderings of violence still sharpen ethnic boundaries.

To briefly summarize these two sets of narratives, interethnic violence creates experiences that instantly mark ethnic boundaries, as well as facilitates further imaginations of ethnicity. However, as will be discussed in the following section, when a balance is broken, violence as a source of fear could ironically create a new groupness that hides ethnicity.

Relinquished ethnicity

Under this subtitle, it is easy for one to think of voluntary or forced conversion during ethnic violence. Of course there are such cases. Stories about how Hui people relinquish their Hui-ness during or after a mass ethnic conflict could be heard in many Hui communities, and traumatic feelings could linger for generations. For instance, certain villages are still remembered as having committed “fan jiao” 反教 in some places in Shandong Province, literarily means that they “betrayed the religion” during ethnic conflicts. However, as noted at the beginning of this essay, to study large scale interethnic conflict is not the purpose. Focus of this part will therefore be folk or popular narratives about past violence, or traumatic experiences.

On this point, Schluessel rightly points out that traumatic experiences and mass conflicts between Muslim and non Muslim populations during late Qing Dynasty create imagined groupness among the Chinese speaking non Muslims in borderlands after the events ended (Reference Schluessel2020, pp. 174–75).

However, trauma brought by violence does not necessarily verify existing ethnic boundaries, it can also recreate different groupnesss where the powerless ironically identify with the powerful, as sometimes people choose to deny ethnicity to lower the risk of becoming victims. The famous Hui author Zhang Chengzhi documents oral history and folk narratives about Hui uprisings during the reign of Qianlong Emperor in the 1780s. In one story he recounts:

This violent conflict in question started from a Salar/Hui Uprising in 1781. The reason was the Manchu government's unfair treatment of two conflicting Islamic Sufi sects in Xunhua, Qinghai. However, this did not hinder it from firstly developing into an uprising against the Qing sovereignty, and later a chaotic ethnic violence against all Hui population in the region. Similar cases were not rare in history, and some actually became interethnic violence between Hui and Han, while the original causes no longer matter (see for instance Lipman Reference Lipman1997, p. 145). I propose situating this cited narrative in this later development, deprived of complex political details and nuances of the real reasons for conflicts, with only interethnic violence sensed: only in this way could we really understand this story.

The story is interesting in that “Ma (马)” is one Chinese surname that is very common among Hui people. Folk etymology has it that this surname is transformed from the Prophet Muhammad's name. So it was quite possible that the old man's family was really Hui. The story is thus about a desperate self-ethnic identification formed in the trauma left by interethnic violence: Mr. Ma was so irritated as to refuse any Hui-ness, it of course could be that he disliked Hui, but it is also very likely that he learned from his forefathers' experiences that it is, or at least was dangerous to be a Hui.

Through violence, Hui people can unite and fight, bond violence with solidarity and deliver a message that their space is un-transgressable; or they can separate and flee, re-identify or de-mark themselves by relinquishing Hui-ness. The Hui, who ironically bear the stereotype of being violent, may abandon their ethnic heritage fearing to become victims of violence. After which, however, violence will still be part of their memory of how they became what they are now for a long time.

Of course, violence does not always force the denial of ethnicity using fear. In some cases violence uses positive connotations to merge ethnic boundaries by creating a more inclusive groupness. The following set of narratives will focus on this aspect of violence, to see how Hui's prowess in combat is welcomed, and their violence is celebrated by both Hui and Han, with ethnic boundaries constantly being merged and negotiated.

The Hui infantry

In this section I look at instances where Hui's violence was celebrated in battles against the collaborationist army under Japanese control, and how some Hui people, for instance those in the Hui Infantry were assimilated into the Chinese Nation for the very sake of their violent deeds, where ethnic boundaries were replaced by political ones.

This paragraph is a record made by an anonymous author writing about a battle happened between the Chinese collaborationist soldiers who fought for Imperial Japan; and the Hui Infantry (Huimin Zhidui 回民支队) which was under the leadership of the Communist Party. The Hui Infantry was formed mainly of Hui people and whose founder and commander Ma Benzhai was also a Hui.Footnote ⁶

This battle description is interesting because firstly, in this battle, more than forty Chinese, most possibly the Han were violently killed by Hui “within half an hour,” but the description is very positive and even cheerful. Secondly, animalization of minority others is common (for instance see Fabre-Vassas Reference Fabre-Vassas1997), in this record, however, the ones who were dehumanized as “bestial” or “beasts” were the Han soldiers instead of the Hui minority. How can we understand this?

The reason for this cheerful record is that the battle reflected a triumph over collaborationists – deputies of Japan in China. In the battlefield, the contact zone described was a firing line, so narrow and deathly that no one would ever think of whether the firing occurring in it was due to inter-ethnic conflict, political conflict, or other reasons. In the record, that contact zone could however be revisited and contoured as politically oriented. The Hui infantry's triumph is not simply a military one, but is also a piece of evidence supporting the communists' righteousness. An implicit message is delivered, that all people in China, including the minorities support the cause of the communist values. And once the meaning of the battle was elevated to power struggle, political concern took precedence over ethnic distinctions. That is why in this instance the collaborationist army replaced the Hui as an other that could be dehumanized/animalized. The two sides were still Hui and Han and the interaction between them was still violent; however, when narrative switched its focus, the social entity that the Hui stood for was no longer their ethnic group, but the Chinese Nation represented by the Communist Party. As Hammond summarizes when discussing Hui Muslims' educational reforms during the Second Sino-Japanese War, that “[b]y sticking together as a country and resisting the Japanese, assimilationists claimed, Sino-Muslims could defeat the Japanese Empire and integrate themselves into the dominant Han Chinese community” (Reference Hammond2020, p. 90. For similar observations see also Lipman Reference Lipman1997, p. 210).

However, in the case of this battle, it is hard to say that the Hui was “integrated.” Not only because that the Hui had to kill in order to be integrated, but also because of their complex relationship with the dominant community. The Hui agreed upon committing violence on the collaborationist soldiers, but they also agreed that Hui were still different: the Hui Infantry was always marked, starting from its name. The Hui Infantry became a social entity with a layered identity, its ethnicity disappeared and emerged, its violence was celebrated, but could still be a marker of Hui-ness.

After Ma Benzhai the Hui Infantry commander's death in 1944, Mr. Zhou Enlai who would become the first Chinese Prime Minister five years later, granted Ma a title: “National Hero (Minzu Yingxiong 民族英雄).” Note that the Chinese term “minzu” used in this title is ambiguous because it could refer to either “nation” thus “Chinese Nation (Zhonghua Minzu),” which is a multi-ethnic unity cultivated by the Chinese government; or “ethnic group” i.e., the “Hui ethnic group (Hui Zu).” I have no evidence to say that Prime Minster Zhou created the ambiguity intentionally; however, this term is versatile enough to embrace all the subtle meanings, and allow all the interpreters to choose their preferred one.

Specifically, in the title of “Minzu Yingxiong,” if we believe that “minzu” stands for the “Chinese Nation,” the title could be thought of as an acknowledgment of Ma and the Hui Infantry, to integrate their contribution into the Nation's endeavor to end the wars. This group of Hui people, i.e., Ma Benzhai and his men, are thus integrated into the nation-state. This interpretation could reflect “Nationalities Unite,” which as Gladney notes, is “the state's preferred slogan… intended to encourage all minorities to unite together with the Han majority for the good of the country (Gladney Reference Gladney1991, p. 313).” Of course, as suggested earlier, the integration was not an unconditional one, and Ma Benzhai's Hui-ness is still highlighted, making a second reading possible:

This ambiguity has always played a role in official broadcast. A 1944 article “Hui Ethnic Hero, Chinese National Hero Ma Benzhai (Huihui minzu yingxiong, zhonghua minzu yingxiong ma benzhai)” (1944, p. 35) was already celebrating this ambiguity by using the term “minzu” twice in its title, the first time for Hui ethnic group, and the second time for the Chinese Nation. In the year of 2004, a TV show called “Minzu Yingxiong Ma Benzhai (National Hero Ma Benzhai)” was on the third channel of Chinese Central Television (CCTV 3).Footnote ⁷ What is extremely interesting is, in the opening scene of this show, when Ma appears in the screen brandishing a machete (violently), a line of Arabic script saying “al-batal l-qaumī yūsuf mā ban tšay (meaning, National Hero Yusuf Ma Benzhai)” appears and tells us the “National Hero” has an Arabic name “yūsuf,”Footnote ⁸ making the hero's ethnic and religious characteristics stand out (Fig. 2). As most Chinese people, even Chinese Muslims, cannot read Arabic, what is the Arabic script doing here? Is it to remind Hui people of their heterogeneous heritage? Does it underscore the state's toleration of an ethnic culture? Or is it simply adding some attractive exoticism (or exotic attractiveness)? I do not intend to impose any meaning on this line of script, by these questions, I am only presenting some possibilities.

Figre 2.

Screenshot of the opening theme of “National Hero Ma Benzhai.”

In any case, ethnicity gives way to the grand narrative of nation state. The integration of Hui, although still related to violent conflicts, provides an opportunity for both Han and Hui to reconsider their ethnic boundaries and their relations with the state. In a grand narrative that highlights the Nation, violence is tamed and ethnicity blurred. On the other hand, the Hui, at least those in the Hui Infantry also used their violence to serve the Nation in order to be incorporated.

This integration-using-violence scenario is also observed in different political contexts. Lipman provides a similar case about Ma Fuxiang, the Hui warlord served the Republican government during the 1920s with his military power and claimed nationalistic unity with the majority Chinese, although superficially (Reference Lipman1997, p. 175).

Of course, again, not all Hui in China could share the same mindset or process of being integrated, even for those who served the state using their violence. But it would be reasonable to argue that violence could become Hui's bargaining chip to negotiate with the state into the Chinese society, although the terms Hui, Chinese-ness and nation all have multiple meanings that change over history. Actually, the relationship between violence and Hui's national identity is even articulated in Hui's oral tradition. In the final set of narratives, such folktales will be shared and discussed.

Hui mercenary soldiers and their Han wives

In this section I will analyze, in a Hui folktale recounting their ancestors' arrival in China, how the Hui ethnic group's boundary is initially clear and then blurred, but all because of their violent deeds.

This folktale is one of several versions of similar arrival legends about why the Hui's imagined ancestors left an also imagined homeland and decided to settle down in China. Almost all of these stories share a theme that Hui people's ancestors were in China “helping the Tang emperor pacify a rebellion,”Footnote ⁹ suggesting a violent beginning of Hui in China.

According to historical records, the Hui people's imagined ancestors, Huihe and Dashi soldiersFootnote ¹⁰ did help the Tang Empire to fight against rebellions, but they also fought against the Tang in other battles (Wu Reference Wu2002, p.119–22 and al-dahabī 1990, p. 347). As warfare was one of the main forces for sustained cultural interaction before the twentieth century (Appadurai Reference Appadurai and Appadurai1996, p. 27), there sure is a possibility that some current Hui people's ancestors emerged in China as former soldiers. It is worth noting that, in the story we cannot find any negative connotation of Hui's violence, such as being former invaders or captives, but only that the Tang emperor invited the Hui people's ancestors to help him pacify a rebellion. Of course, even being mercenaries is not so friendly a presence, because after all, they practiced violence in a state not their own. Had the Hui ancestors just served as warriors to the royalty, their interaction with China (or more accurately, the Tang Empire) could have ended after the war, and the boundary between them and the local is still writ large.

However, they settled down and took local wives by force. The interaction suddenly became a violent exchange: one side offered military service and the other offered reluctant women who had to be taken by force. As Gladney observed in discussing this folktale, “Only through state sanctioned rape, the story suggests, can this community survive” and “the relations, even at the very beginning, between Hui and Han were not always peaceful” (Gladney Reference Gladney2004, p. 112).Footnote ¹¹

Hui people's position in China was thus tinged with violence in their own folktale. Hui ancestors' settling down in China was a displacement of a heterogeneous power (the rebels). If the rebellion that motivated the Emperor to seek help from the Hui was already a violation of existing order, the Hui's settling down after they helped pacify the rebellion is a further complication of the violation. They surpassed the rebels and replaced them, standing out as a more violent and fearful other.

However, their otherness was subtly blurred: the Hui's ancestors, although marked, expressed a willingness to be integrated into the host country by taking brides from them; while the local people, although were disadvantaged in terms of military competence, were tolerant enough to give a new home for a heterogeneous other. We could imagine, after the Hui soldiers settled down, the tension in the interaction between them and their Han neighbors, especially their in-laws, would be moderated by the kinship built on marriage, their contact zone might still be a place for cultures and identities to crash and negotiate, however, it would more become a place for getting along. And ironically, because of marriage, the mark of “being violent” would be inherited not only by Hui's descendants, but by Han's posterity as well. This intertwined relation, though suggested by a folktale, is real in many families of interethnic marriage.

Briefly, in the first part of the story, the Hui, or their ancestors as foreign mercenaries practiced violence for the local people, fighting against the rebels; while in the second part, the Hui practiced another kind of violence on the local people, taking wives by force. Violent deeds both cut out and merge spaces between the imagined Hui and Han in a folktale from the past, but with a very real implication in the Hui-Han relation in everyday life today.

Noteworthy are also the gender elements in this story about violence. In this folktale, the Hui's representatives, the soldiers or mercenaries, are males; while the representatives of the majority Han in this fictitious relationship are women. We may therefore suggest a possibility of the Han being feminized here. In an interethnic relation, scholars focus on the minority's being feminized in majority's discursive practices (see Gladney Reference Gladney2004, p. 64; Harrell Reference Harrell and Harrell1995, pp. 10–13 and Fabre-Vassas Reference Fabre-Vassas1997, pp. 145–46). Nonetheless, if we pay enough attention to the minority folktales like the one cited here, we find a reverse though similar inclination to feminize the majority.

In this and the previous sections, we could see both Hui and Han groupness has been constantly shaped and reshaped when the grand narrative of nation and state is dominant, or when the Hui narrators would explain their original arrival in their own homeland. Although the Hui are still linked to violence and may even have committed violence on the Han in either a real or imagined world, such violence ironically leads to a process of integration and blurred ethnicity. This again reiterates my argument that violence does not always sharpen ethnic boundaries.