| This dissertation narrates and analyzes the process of assimilation and incorporation of the Gansu periphery. Gansu province, the cultural and ethnic frontier of northwest China, encloses the edges of several worlds--Mongolia, Central Asia, Tibet, China. Its inhabitants have contended and blended to create a unique frontier society with a Han Chinese majority but not always controlled by the Chinese state.; Beginning with the Hezhou/Xining uprising of 1895, the narrative clarifies the ethnic and socio-economic causes of "Muslim rebellion" in China, contending that local hatreds and local revenge played central roles in precipitating Han-Hui conflict. The standard explanations--jihad, separatist Muslim fanaticism, hatred based explicitly on religious ideology--do not stand up under closely detailed, localized scrutiny. The rapidly expanding trade in wool between Tibet and China, a trade monopolized by Muslims for part of its length, joined "Muslim Gansu" to China in new and profitable ways. Muslim institutions, particularly the menhuan or leading lineage, changed in adaptation to Han presence and pressure. The dissertation explores the tension between assimilation and ethnic hatred as revealed by division and conflict within Hui communities.; A Gansu Muslim army, under a Han general, participated in the Boxer war and the siege of the Legations, and a Gansu restorationist army attacked revolutionary Shaanxi in 1911. Both of these point to a closer relationship between periphery and the Chinese core. But the rise of a Gansu Muslim military elite, localist in its loyalties but capable of participation in warlord politics, militated for greater independence and provincial identity without reference to the wobbly Republic. These contradictions kept Gansu a battleground from 1911 to 1925, as did the invasion of the White Wolf bandits in 1914.; Invaded and conquered by Feng Yuxiang's Guominjun in 1925-26, Gansu's Muslim warlords remained neutral. Overwhelming taxation and conscription, plus major natural disasters, led to a series of anti-Guominjun outbreaks in 1927, violence which quickly degenerated into anti-Muslim pogroms and a province-wide bloodletting between Han and Hui. Stripped bare by war, famine, and its own provincial government, Gansu rejoiced at Feng's departure in 1929. After 1930, the province was rapidly incorporated into Guomindang China by the Muslim warlords themselves, who finally saw advantage in alliance with a national power. With the arrival of the Long March, national armies and nationalist ideologies forced Gansu people to choose between Red and White, rather than between Han and Hui or between various sub-divisions of Hui society.; This thesis concludes that modernism and national integration have replaced traditional laissez-faire policies toward the periphery in national politics. But at the local, community level, distinctions between Han and Hui, between majority and minority, are and will be maintained. Dominant and dominated cultures, however divided they may be internally, need Others in order to define their own identity and protect their ethnic integrity.; The dissertation relies on traditional Chinese historical sources such as gazetteers, campaign records, and archival compilations; on the rich periodical literature of the mid-Republican period; and on the research and conclusions of Japanese scholars of the past four decades. Additional observations are taken from travel accounts, missionary publications, and contemporary newspapers. |
