Identity
During the Qing dynasty, the term Zhongyuanren was synonymous with being Chinese, especially referring to Han Chinese and Hui Muslims in Xinjiang or Central Asia.
Because of religious reasons, while Hui people do not consider themselves Han and are not Han Chinese, the Hui consider themselves wider Chinese and also refer to themselves as Zhongyuanren. The Dungan people, descendants of Hui who fled to Central Asia, called themselves Zhongyuanren in addition to the standard labels Lao Huihui and Huizi. Zhongyuanren was used generally by Turkic Muslims to refer to general Chinese people. When Central Asian invaders from Kokand invaded Kashgar, in a letter the kokandi commander criticizes the Kashgari Turkic Muslim Ishaq for allegedly not behaving like a Muslim and wanting to be a Zhongyuanren (Chinese).
Read more about this topic: Dungan People
Famous quotes containing the word identity:
“Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)