The Last Minarets of Yunnan

In late May, thousands of Hui Muslims clashed with local police in the town of Nagu in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province. They were protesting the government’s plan to demolish the dome and minarets of the Najiaying mosque, a structure originally built in the fourteenth century. The mosques of Najiaying and nearby Shadian have stood as relics of the Chinese state’s past tolerance of Islam and Muslims in Yunnan. They are the last two mosques in the province to still boast traditionally Arab features, namely domes and minarets. Recent years have seen the government-backed transformation of several mosques in Yunnan, with their roofs remade to resemble Buddhist pagodas and Confucian temples. These renovations go well beyond architectural style and reveal the uncompromising nationalist tenor of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s rule.

Xi’s hugely repressive clampdown on another Muslim minority, the Uyghurs, has attracted tremendous international attention. But his somewhat more subtle campaigns of Sinicization targeting other minorities have flown largely under the radar. Hui Muslims number around 11 million people and live mostly in the western and central provinces of China. The community has been in China for a long time, tracing its origins to the migration of Muslims out of Central Asia and the Middle East starting in the eighth century. Unlike the Uyghurs, who speak a Turkic language, Hui Muslims speak Mandarin Chinese and its local dialects. But their practice of Islam, with its almost inescapable connections to non-Han cultures, increasingly places them on the wrong side of Xi’s vision of national identity.

The ethnoreligious tolerance that was once possible under the Chinese Communist Party no longer exists under Xi. Beijing is determined to remove the last vestiges of supposedly foreign religious architecture, including prominent so-called Arab-style features. Such evidence of cosmopolitan or foreign attachments clashes with the ideological notion of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that Xi has constructed in recent years, one that elevates the Han Chinese heritage of the country over all other traditions and histories. The protests in May managed only to temporarily delay the demolition of the dome and minarets. Unfortunately for the Hui and many other minority groups, little seems to stand in the way of Xi and his bid to bulldoze a new China into being.

ISLAM’S CHINESE HOME

Muslims have been in China for over a thousand years. The earliest known diplomatic contact between Arab Muslims and a Chinese state occurred in 651 when ambassadors of the first Muslim caliphate arrived in the court of the Tang emperor. A century later, the eastward expansion of the Abbasid empire and the westward expansion of the Tang collided in 751 in the battle of Talas in what is now Kazakhstan. The Chinese forces suffered a major defeat that enabled the spread of Islam in Central Asia. But through commerce and gradual migration, not military conquest, Muslim communities began to emerge in what is now China. Middle Easterners and newly converted Central Asians made up the majority of the early Muslim settlers who arrived in China’s major cities and coastal entrepôts. They are considered to be the ancestors of the Hui.

Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which ruled China between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Muslim populations grew in many parts of the country. Ties to other Mongol-controlled Muslim regions, including the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia and the Ilkhanate in what is now Iran, brought more Muslims into China. Droves of Central Asian Muslims of various professions traveled to China to aid Mongol rule.

Muslims have been in China for over a thousand years.

But the expulsion of the Mongols in the mid-fourteenth century left Muslim communities to face rising xenophobia during the rule of the nativist Ming dynasty. In fact, the Ming dynasty was the first Chinese regime to attempt, as a matter of official policy, to Sinicize Muslim ethnicities. In the dynasty’s early years, Muslims of various origins and languages had to adopt the Chinese language and culture and were forced to marry non-Muslims. Some Muslim scholars and officials, who either went through the Confucian civil service examinations or mastered the Chinese classics, began to study Islam through a Confucian lens to better conform to the strictures of the state. A cultural and religious movement during the late Ming period and the early Qing period produced a rich collection of Chinese Islamic texts—known as han kitab (Chinese books)—that illustrated Islam’s compatibility with the state’s Confucian ideology.

The communist takeover of China in 1949 posed another challenge to the country’s Muslims. The Marxist historical materialism espoused by the Chinese Communist Party and its atheist “critique of heaven” targeted all forms of religiosity and spirituality. The Red Guards’ attacks on Chinese Muslims reached a height during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Authorities imprisoned many imams and converted many mosques into barns, warehouses, and even pigsties. In 1975, Hui Muslims in Yunnan protested a mosque closure in the town of Shadian. In response, the Chinese army swept into the town and some surrounding villages. By many estimates, the soldiers slaughtered more than 1,600 Hui Muslim men, women, and children.

The state’s posture toward Hui Muslims would soften under the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping, who rose to power in 1978. Deng pursued a more conciliatory approach to Islam by insisting that socialism could accommodate religion and by permitting the restoration of destroyed mosques and the construction of new ones. Such tolerance continued in the following decades during the tenures of subsequent rulers, including Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. The Hui did not have to feel out of place in their own country.

THE NATIVIST TURN

Under Xi, however, things have changed markedly. By contrast to his predecessors, Xi’s avowed ideological understanding of socialism leans heavily on traditional Han Chinese history and culture. Where Mao Zedong, the founder and first ruler of the People’s Republic of China, sought to ground his vision of Chinese socialism in the realities of the country in the early twentieth century, Xi looks further back to the 5,000-year history of zhonghua minzu (the Chinese people), a term invented and made popular by early-twentieth-century Han nationalists.

Xi insists that he is merely following in Mao’s footsteps, offering a “second combination” of Marxist doctrine and Chinese circumstances. But he actually departs considerably from Mao in his emphasis; Mao did not tie Marxism to traditional Han Chinese culture and history, probably owing to the inherent incompatibility between socialism, which seeks the eradication of social classes, and Confucianism, which believes in the preservation of social hierarchies.

Nevertheless, at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2022, Xi reaffirmed that “to uphold and develop Marxism, we must integrate it with China’s fine traditional culture. Only by taking root in the rich historical and cultural soil of the country and the nation can the truth of Marxism flourish here.” In his view, only traditional Han Chinese civilization could supply the so-called Chinese characteristics of contemporary Marxism. Four months later, the communiqué of the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the CCP requested the adaptation of basic Marxist tenets to China’s “fine traditional culture.”

In pursuit of this new model of Chinese identity, Xi has actively promoted the study of Han Chinese history. In 2019, the state set up a school at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing to focus on Chinese history and culture. Three years later, Xi approved the construction of China’s National Archives of Publications and Culture, an act that seeks to echo the Qing empire’s establishment of libraries and collections of texts in the late eighteenth century. This invocation of pre-modern history is part of his broader ideological effort to Sinicize Marxism. Such a nationalist emphasis on the supposedly unique civilization and culture of the country places Xi in the company of many populist leaders today, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, and former U.S. President Donald Trump.

UNITY, NOT DIVERSITY

Xi’s desire to Sinicize socialism and to yoke China’s modern identity to an ancient Han identity effectively marginalizes ethnoreligious minorities such as Hui Muslims, whose history and culture connect them to the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. From the vantage point of Beijing, foreign and non-Han architectural styles are unwelcome; they do not fit into Xi’s model of contemporary socialism with Han Chinese cultural characteristics. And in the name of that model, the state seeks to sweep away evidence of the foreign in Yunnan and elsewhere.

Few forces seem capable of arresting this cultural purge. The protests against the planned demolitions in Yunnan highlight one of the last bastions of Muslim resistance against religious repression. But it seems unlikely that locals will be able to block the state’s push for Sinicization; after a delay, authorities are removing the dome and minarets of the Najiaying mosque. In addition to deploying a large detachment of security and police forces to the town during the protests in late May, the latest local government order, issued in June, stated that the Sinicization of the Najiaying mosque would take six months to complete. Government officials have been visiting local Hui families to compel their signatures on so-called consent forms that sanction the “reforming” of the mosque.

Xi’s Sinicization campaign will flatten the complexity of Chinese society.

Xi’s program will not end at converting architectural styles. The state will likely convince certified imams of (or indoctrinate them into believing in) the necessity of the Sinicization of Islam, ensuring that these politically reliable imams interpret the religion in ways that reinforce socialist and Han Chinese cultural values. Authorities will curb the religious and cultural practices that many Hui Muslims follow, such as maintaining the habitual practice of the faith, wearing robes, and learning Arabic. This move will likely lead to the further development of indigenous Islam in China, reviving the han kitab tradition of a Chinese version of Islam. By doing so, the Sinicization campaign strives to separate Chinese Islam from the wider Muslim world.

That may constitute a blow to China’s soft power. The forceful Sinicization campaign runs counter to Xi’s March proposal for a “global civilization initiative.” According to Xi, tolerance, coexistence, exchanges, and mutual learning among different civilizations play an irreplaceable role in allowing humanity to advance and flourish. But such warmth for other civilizations is increasingly absent within China’s borders. When visible in Chinese towns and communities, reminders of the Middle Eastern origins of Islam are undesirable.

At a time when China is trying to project itself onto the international stage as a “civilization-state,” its cultural campaigns may hurt its reputation and weaken its influence in the Muslim world. And they may rebound on China locally; Xi’s Sinicization project threatens a cultural decoupling between Chinese and Muslim populations in predominantly Muslim neighboring countries in South Asia and Southeast Asia.

But beyond ramifications for China abroad, the campaign risks impoverishing the richness of Chinese society at home. Xi’s program of forceful Sinicization represents the abandonment of the notion of duo yuan yi ti (pluralistic unity) in the Han-dominated state’s approach to relations with ethnic minorities. Instead, that pluralism is becoming intensely subordinate to the imperative of unity, with the party-state enshrining the Han civilizational heritage. Such Han cultural hegemony will only flatten the complexity of China and diminish the country—and stoke bitterness, dissent, and resistance among those whose culture the state seeks to erase.