Sinicizing Muslims: Haunting, Punitiveness, and Sacrifice in Neoliberalizing China Open Access
Li, Qucheng (Eric) (Spring 2024)
Abstract
Starting from 2015, the Chinese government has been carrying out a new political movement targeting the country’s Muslim population – the Sinicization campaign. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Hui Muslims in Nanjing and Yunnan, China, this thesis focuses on two interconnected governmental practices involved in the campaign: the purging of symbols related to Islam and Arabness from public spaces – a process that I call “symbolicide,” and the creation of a new, state-sanctioned Islam disseminated in mosques throughout the country. In Chapter 1, I examine the past and present social processes that collectively contributed to the Sinicization campaign. During China’s 20th-century history of foreign penetration, ethnic minorities were considered simultaneously as people who needed to be incorporated into the nation’s anti-imperialist battles and as unstable elements within the nation who had extensive connections with hostile foreign forces. These two contradictory historical remnants carry on into the contemporary age of neoliberalization in China, which has produced new forms of dispossession and opportunities for Hui Muslims. In Chapter 2, situating symbolicide in the global rise of punitiveness, I argue that the emergence of symbolicide is connected to the dual fears of the Chinese government: 1) a fear of losing its mythical hold over the population in an age of frequent crises under neoliberalism; 2) a fear derived from an imagined association between ethnic minorities and foreign penetration inherited from the colonial past. In Chapter 3, understanding the state-sanctioned Islam as an “Islamic assemblage,” I argue that it serves to shape Muslims into subjects who can contribute to the nation’s rejuvenation, a politics of sacrifice that 1) uses neoliberal economic development as its means; 2) parallels the country’s past anticolonial attempts to encourage all ethnicities to sacrifice for the nation. In both chapters, I also discuss the affective experiences of pessimistic confusion and cosmopolitan desires among my interlocutors as the Sinicization campaign wages on.
Table of Contents
Figures 1
Introduction: Destruction, Production, and the Sinicization Campaign 5
Chapter One: Contextualizing the Sinicization Campaign: Historical Processes and Neoliberal Globalization 25
Chapter Two: Symbolicide, Punitiveness, and Pessimistic Confusion 46
Chapter Three: State-Islam, Sacrifice, and Cosmopolitan Desires 69
Conclusion: Lingering Specter, Contentious Identities 94
Bibliography 97
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