Identity politics in south Fujian Hui communities (China)

The present dissertation provides an example of how social and political conditions influence people of two descent groups on the southern Fujian coast to claim their ethnic identity.{09}The study deals with identity change in two communities in Jinjiang City and Hui'an County, known for their foreign Muslim origins throughout the history, and focuses on how these people have constructed their Hui identity in the past two decades. The first half of this dissertation examine how the ancestors of these people assimilated to the local Han culture after the collapse of the great port of Quanzhou in the fourteenth century, and how they “rediscovered” their foreign Muslim heritage during the first four decades of the twentieth century. The central argument of this study is in the second half of the dissertation, of which examines how and why the State had to carry out a particular social policy towards ethnic minorities, and the way this policy affected people's social life, stimulating them to ponder their subjective identity.; Both the Ding and Guo residents in northeastern Jinjiang City and southeastern Hui'an County are best known for their Hui ethnicity nowadays, but they did not engaged in Islamic practice for centuries. While these people maintain cultural practices identical to those of their Han neighbors even today, they started to construct their Hui identity after 1978. Nowadays the people who are the subjects of my study have presented themselves as beneficiaries of the socialist state through projects such as, among others, establishing exhibitions and pursuing architectural representation in a style they consider “Muslim”. By doing so they have presented themselves as the beneficiary of the state preferential policy towards national minorities. At the same time, their commitments to national identity politics have helped free them from state restrictions on their real social life, allowing them to revitalize folk tradition to strengthen their cultural identity, which in some way may be considered as the return of feudalistic relationships based on patriarchal kinship solidarity.