Who Are the Hui? A Necessary Footnote of Inconvenience

Abstract:This article addresses two issues germane to the scholarly quest for Hui identity in the modern era. First, it adds to recent historiography on the Hui by constructing an account of the amalgamation of this corporate identity over the twentieth century. I argue that this conglomeration may only be maintained by overlooking the divergence between the territorially compact Hui communities in Northwest China and the deterritorialized Muslim minority members in China's eastern provinces. This article also cites the continued circulation of the Perso-Arabic xiao'erjin script as evidence for the distinctive northwestern Hui identity. I argue that decentering the eastern provinces and their Chinese language print culture results in a new typology of the Hui, one in which the state-defined negative attribute of "three lacks"—common script, common territory, common economic life—may define the widely dispersed eastern Hui but does not describe the Hui in the northwestern heartland.