Hui People - Chinese Identity

Chinese Identity

Some prominent Hui, such as Imam Ma Chao-yen of the Taipei Grand Mosque, refer to themselves and other Hui people as Chinese in English, and consider themselves to practice Chinese, Confucian Culture.

The term Chinese Muslim is sometimes used to refer to Hui people. This is based mainly in the fact that their native language is a Chinese dialect, in contrast to Turkic speaking Salars and other Muslims. During the Qing Dynasty, "Chinese Muslim" (Han Hui) was the term sometimes used to refer to Hui people, which differentiated them from non-Chinese speaking Muslims. In contrast, the Uyghurs were called "Chan Tou Hui" ("Turban Headed Muslim"), and the Turkic Salars called "Sala Hui" (Salar Muslim). While the Turkic speakers often referred the Hui as "Dungan". John Stuart Thomson, who traveled in China called them "Mohammedan Chinese". Because the Qing Dynasty grouped Muslims by language, the Chinese-speaking Hui had to wear the queue, while most Turkic Hui do not, except for their leaders. They have also been called "Chinese Mussulmans", when Europeans wanted to distinguish them from Han Chinese.

The Qing authorities considered both Han and Hui to be Chinese, and in Xinjiang Both Hui and Han were classified as merchants regardless of profession. Laws were passed segregating the different races, in theory, keeping Turkic Muslims apart from Hui and Han, however, the law was not followed. Hui and Han households were built closer together in the same area while Turkic Muslims would live farther away from the town.

Before the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, when the revolutionaries faced the ideological dilemma on how to unify the country while at the same time acknowledging ethnic minorities, Hui people were noted as Chinese Muslims, separate from Uyghurs. The Jahriyya Sufi leader Ma Yuanzhang said in response to accusations that Muslims were disloyal to China: "Our lives, livelihoods, and graves are in China. . . . We have been good citizens among the Five Nationalities!". The Muslim General Ma Fuxiang encouraged Confucian style assimilation for all Muslims into Chinese culture, and even set up an assimilationist group for this purpose. Imams such as Hu Songshan encouraged Chinese nationalism in their mosques, and the Yihewani was led by many nationalist Imams.

For some Uyghurs, there is barely any difference between Hui and Han. A Uyghur social scientist, Dilshat, regarded Hui as the same people as Han, deliberately calling Hui people Han and dismissing the Hui as having only a few hundred years of history.

The Kuomintang party and, Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang party leader, considered all the minority peoples of China, including the Hui, as descedants of Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor and semi mythical founder of the Chinese nation, and belonging to the Chinese Nation Zhonghua Minzu and he introduced this into Kuomintang ideology, which was propagated into the educational system of the Republic of China.